Mary Kate Hurley

Education

2013 - PhD, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
2008 - MPhil, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
2005 - MA, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
2004 - BA, English and History, Wake Forest University

Biography

Mary Kate Hurley teaches medieval literature at Ohio University, where she has been a member of the English department since 2013. She currently serves as the Director of Studies for the Honors Tutorial College program in English. She is also the Assessment Director for HTC, and served as interim Associate Dean of HTC from January 2023 to July 2024.

Dr. Hurley received her MA (2005), MPhil (2008) and PhD (2013) from Columbia University's department of English and Comparative Literature. She received her BA from Wake Forest University in 2004, where she graduated magna cum laude with departmental honors in English and History.

Her writing has appeared in Review of English Studies, Exemplaria, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Literature Compass, and Postmedieval, as well as many edited collections. With Elizabeth Allen (UC-Irvine) and Gina Marie Hurley (Yale University), she co-edited a special cluster of essays in Exemplaria called "The Spaces and Times of Crisis" (2022). She co-edited a 2017 special issue of Postmedieval titled "Speaking Across Tongues," with Jonathan Hsy and A.B. Kraebel. Her first monograph, Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England was published in the Ohio State University Press Interventions series in July 2021. She is presently at work on a project tentatively titled "The Speculative Medieval," which uses theories of speculative fiction and cognitive estrangement to explore the literary tradition of the medieval computus.

Her scholarly work has received grants from Wake Forest University, Columbia University, Ohio University, the Medieval Academy of America, and the Whiting Foundation. She is also a project team member for Life Worth Living, a pedagogical initiative that prioritizes student learning through first person engagement in existential questions and truth-seeking pluralism.

Research Interests

Old and Middle English language and literature, Anglo-Norman literature, Critical Theory, Speculative Fiction, Ecocriticism, the History of the English Language, and American Medievalism

Publications

Books

• Hurley, Mary Kate. Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2021

Journal Special Editions

• Hurley, Mary Kate, Elizabeth Allen and Gina Marie Hurley. "Forum: The Spaces and Times of Crisis." Exemplaria 34.3 (2022): 209-273.
• Hurley, Mary Kate, Jonathan H. Hsy and A.B. Kraebel. "Thinking Across Tongues." Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 8.3 (September 2017).

Articles

• Hurley, Mary Kate, Elizabeth Allen and Gina Marie Hurley, "Introduction: The Spaces and Times of Crisis." Exemplaria 34.3 (2022) 209-214. https://doi-org.proxy.library.ohio.edu/10.1080/10412573.2022.2099120
• Hurley, Mary Kate. "Elemental Intimacies: Fire, Mourning, and the Finnsburg Episode." In Dating Beowulf: New Essays on Intimacy, 147-163. Edited by Daniel Remein and Erica Weaver. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2020.
• Hurley, Mary Kate. "Choosing a Past: Fictional Indigeneity in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim." In American/Medieval Goes North: Earth and Water in Transit, 137-163. Edited by Gillian Overing and Ulrike Wiethaus. Göttigen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2019.
• Hurley, Mary Kate and Irina Dumitrescu. "Afterword." In Remembering the Present: Generative Uses of England’s Pre-Conquest Past, 289-294. Edited by Jay Paul Gates and Brian T. O’Camb. Leiden: Brill Press, 2019.
• Hurley, Mary Kate. "Weathering Time in the Wanderer." In The Shapes of Early English Poetry (a festschrift for Roberta Frank), 15-36. Edited by Irina Dumitrescu and Eric Weiskott. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Press, 2019.
• Mary Kate Hurley. "Dream of the Rood." In The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain. Edited by Sian Echard and Robert Rouse. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017.
  https://doi-org.proxy.library.ohio.edu/10.1002/9781118396957.wbemlb347
• Hurley, Mary Kate, Jonathan Hsy, and A.B. Kraebel. "Editors’ Introduction: Thinking Across Tongues." Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies Special Issue "Thinking Across Tongues" 8.3 (September 2017): 270-276. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41280-017-0059-x/fulltext.html
• Hurley, Mary Kate. "Distant Knowledge in the British Library, Cotton Tiberius B.v Wonders of the East." Review of English Studies 67, 282 (2016): 827-843. http://res.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2016/08/18/res.hgw082
• Hurley, Mary Kate. "Scars of History: Temporal Archives and A Game of Thrones" in American/Medieval: Nature and Mind in Cultural Transfer, 131-150. Edited by Gillian R. Overing and Ulrike Wiethaus. Göttigen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2016.
• Hurley, Mary Kate. "Saintly Ecologies: Tracing Collectivities in the Life of King Oswald of Northumbria." In The Politics of Ecology: Land, Life and Law in Medieval Britain, 127-150. Edited by Randy P. Schiff and Joseph Taylor. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2016.
• Hurley, Mary Kate. "Monsters." In Medieval Culture: A Compendium of Critical Topics, 1167-1183. Edited by Albrecht Classen. Berlin and New York: DeGruyter, 2015.
• Hurley, Mary Kate. "Alfredian Temporalities: Time and Translation in the Old English Orosius." The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 112, No. 4 (October 2013): 405-432, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jenglgermphil.112.4.0405

Courses Taught

• ENG 2020: Poetry and Drama
• ENG 3110: Tolkien's Middle Ages
• ENG 3110: English Literature to 1500
• ENG 3510: History of the English Language
• ENG 4600: Topics in English Studies (Love and Monsters: Medieval Romance and the Legend of Arthur)
• ENG 5090: Medieval Literature (graduate)
• ENG 7090: Community, Collectivity, Ecology (graduate)