Jessica Rosenfeld specializes in late medieval literature, the medieval reception of Aristotle (ethics and politics), medieval women’s writing, and the history of emotions.
Rosenfeld’s first book, Ethics and Enjoyment in Late Medieval Poetry: Love after Aristotle (Cambridge University Press, 2011) explores the influence of Aristotelian ethics on the way medieval philosophers and poets wrote about love, pleasure, labor, and human happiness. The book also considers the legacy of “courtly love” in the psychoanalytic ethics of Jacques Lacan. Her forthcoming book, Foundations of Feeling: Theorizing Emotions in Late Medieval Literature examines the medieval foundations of modern ideas about emotions and affect – including debates about whether emotions are primarily bodily or primarily cognitive, the status of “natural” emotions, the gendering of emotion, and emotional taxonomies. She has published articles on Chaucer, John Gower, Margery Kempe, and The Romance of the Rose in journals including New Medieval Literatures, JMEMS, Exemplaria, and New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession, and in several edited collections. She co-edited a collection of essays, Chaucer and the Subversion of Form (Cambridge University Press, 2018), served as co-editor of the journal Exemplaria: Medieval – Early Modern – Theory (2019-2023), and Associate Editor of The Chaucer Encyclopedia (Wiley-Blackwell, 2023). She recently published an essay on psychoanalysis and medieval transgender studies in the centennial issue of Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies and co-edited a colloquium on the same topic in Studies in the Age of Chaucer. She is currently working on a project studying medieval stories about the origin of politics and the relationship between politics and nature. In 2014-15, she held a Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship from the ACLS.
Professor Rosenfeld has recently taught undergraduate and graduate courses on Medieval Women’s Writing, Chaucer, Medieval Emotions, Medieval Gender and Sexuality, Medieval Literature and the Art of Love, and the Medieval Dream Vision.
Rosenfeld is an affiliate faculty member of the Departments of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Comparative Literature and Thought, and Classics.