Ruth Nisse
347 Andrews Hall
Lincoln, NE 68588-0333
(402)472-1804 (office)
rnisse@unlserve.unl.edu

Ruth Nisse

Associate Professor

Degrees and institutions granting the degree

• Columbia University, BA (1987)
• University of California, Berkeley, PhD (1995)

Professional Areas of Specialty

• Medieval Literature with specialties in theater and exegesis
• relations among Jews, Muslims, and Christians in the Middle Ages

Courses regularly taught

• Medieval Drama
• Medieval and Renaissance Women Writers
• Shakespeare

Selected publications and/or projects

Books

• My current project is Jacob’s Shipwreck: Diaspora in the Literature of the Jewish and Christian Middle Ages. The book will explore the textual worlds of medieval Christian and Jewish authors in France and England at those points when they come into either conflict or dialogue with each other over shared traditions Beginning with the Latin and Hebrew accounts of the Fall of the Second Temple, I will argue that postbiblical literature––ˇˇa term meant to encompass a body of disparate texts otherwise labeled apocrypha, pseudepigrapha, midrash and aggadah––becomes central to the polemics that define the Jewish Diaspora in Western Europe c.1100-1300.
• Defining Acts: Drama and the Politics of Interpretation in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame University Press, 2005).

Articles and Book Chapters

• ‘Your name will no longer be Aseneth’ : The Liber de Aseneth, Anti-Martyrdom, and Jewish Conversion in Thirteenth-Century England. (Forthcoming, Speculum, July 2006).
• “Was it not Routhe to Se? Lydgate and the Styles of Martyrdom" in John Lydgate: New Essays in Cultural and Literary Interpretation, ed. Lawrence Scanlon and James Simpson (University of Notre Dame Press, 2006).
• “Grace Under Fire: Representation, Conduct and Community in the Norwich Heresy Trials”, in Medieval Conduct: Texts, Theories, Practices, ed. Kathleen Ashley and Robert L.A. Clark (University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 207-25.
• “Prophetic Nations,” New Medieval Literatures 4 (Oxford University Press, 2001), 95-115.
• “Hoccleve’s ‘Fadres Olde and Modres’: Gender, Heresy, and Literary Politics,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 275-99.
• “ ‘A Coroun Ful Riche’: The Rule of History in St. Erkenwald,” English Literary History, 65:2 (1998): 277-95.
• “Staged Interpretations: Civic Rhetoric and Lollard Politics in the York Plays,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 28: 2 (1998): 431-56.
• “Reversing Discipline: The Tretise of Miracles Pleyinge, Lollard Exegesis and the Failure of Representation,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 11 (1997): 163-94.
• “Cobham’s Daughter: The Book of Margery Kempe and the Power of Heterodox Thinking,” Modern Language Quarterly 56:3 (1995): 277-304.