Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Mariah Min is a fall 2021–spring 2023 Postdoctoral Fellow in International Humanities in the Department of English, the Program in Medieval Studies, and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. Her book manuscript, “Figure Writing: Technologies of Character in Medieval Literature,” examines medieval literary characters in order to disentangle the longstanding conflation of character and human subjectivity within both critical and popular discourse. She demonstrates that medieval character — with its visible seams of construction — can reframe characterization as a tactic deployed by the text rather than an unmediated depiction of psychology; this enables us to recognize the ideological underpinnings of characterization as a literary technique and to ask for what ends the figure of the human is deployed, in contexts ranging from medieval literature to contemporary political rhetoric. Through her research and teaching, she aims to resist the isolation of medieval studies within English, speaking across periods in order to shed light on medieval materials through modern lenses, but also to refine modern lenses through medieval case studies.

In 2020–2021, she presented papers at meetings of the Modern Language Association and the Northeast Modern Language Association and spoke at AfterAffects: New Methods in Affect Theory, a virtual symposium hosted by the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago. She also started serving as the section co-editor for the Global Antiquity to Medieval ambit of Literature Compass, and she was a member of the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society’s 2022 committee for the Alexandra Johnston Award, given to the best conference paper in early drama delivered by a graduate student.

Read an interview about her research in “The Humanities in Practice.”