Biography

Larissa "Kat" Tracy (PhD, Medieval Literature, Trinity College, Dublin, 2000) is Professor of Medieval Literature at Longwood University, Farmville, VA (2022). Her work focuses on thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth century English literature that looks back to the pre-Conquest period in England and the Viking Age, with cross-cultural contacts in medieval French, Irish, and Welsh and a specific focus on social justice, law, medicine, and judicial punishment. Her publications include Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature (D.S. Brewer, 2012), Women of the Gilte Legende (D.S. Brewer, 2003) and the edited collections Heads Will Roll: Decapitation in the Medieval and Early Modern Imagination, with Jeff Massey (Brill, 2012), Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages (D.S. Brewer, 2013), Wounds and Wound Repair in Medieval Culture, with Kelly DeVries (Brill, 2015), Flaying in the Premodern World: Practice and Representation (D.S. Brewer, 2017), Medieval and Early Modern Murder (Boydell, 2018), and Treason: Medieval and Early Modern Adultery, Betrayal, and Shame (Brill 2019). She has published articles on violence, fabliaux, comedy, Norse sagas, romance, gender, hagiography, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; she is also the series editor for Explorations in Medieval Culture (Brill), and served as the editor of Eolas: The Journal for the American Society of Irish Medieval Studies (ASIMS) for six years (2013-2019). In 2016, she was a Visiting Scholar at St. John's College, Oxford. She currently serves as the Vice President of MEARCSTAPA, a professional society dedicated to the study of medieval monstrosity, and as President of ASIMS. She has appeared in several National Geographic and Discovery Channel documentaries and her work on medievalisms has been published by Salon, Business Insider, Elite Daily, Entertainment Weekly, The Wrap; and Women in the World (New York Times).
- IMDb mini biography by: Larissa Tracy