Hwaet!

Welcome to the website of Larissa ( Kat ) Tracy, Ph.D., assistant professor of Medieval Literature at Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia.

My specialties and areas of interest range from Middle English saints' lives, fifteenth century manuscripts, medieval romance, Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, medieval torture in literature, Old French fabliaux, Old Norse/Icelandic literature, Celtic literature, and women's studies. I spent five years in Dublin, Ireland where I received my M.Litt. and Ph.D. from Trinity College, Dublin. During the course of both my undergraduate and graduate studies, I worked as a journalist for a number of newspapers, American and Irish. I taught in the Washington, D.C. area from 2000-2005, and have been at Longwood University since fall 2005. This site encapsulates both my academic/teaching career and my journalism experience, including course materials and conference information.

I participated in a National Endowment for the Humanities summer teaching institute on Inquisitions and Persecutions in Sixteenth Century Europe and the Americas at the University of Maryland in 2005. In 2003, I participated in an NEH research seminar on Old French Fabliaux and the Medieval Sense of the Comic at Yale University, and my book Women of the Gilte Legende: A Selection of Middle English Saints' Lives was published by D.S. Brewer in April 2003. I am currently revising my second book project Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature and Culture and several conference papers for submission and publication.

Since 2005, I have been featured in a National Geographic documentary on the Knights Templar, a Discovery Channel documentary on the Shroud of Turin, and interviewed for NPR’s radio show With Good Reason. The segment is titled: Getting Medieval: Torture through the Centuries, and will be available from the NPR.org website after 26 February, 2010 at the following link: http://withgoodreasonradio.org/2010/02/getting-medieval-torture-through-the-centuries/