About

medieval literature, critical animal studies, materialisms, ecotheory.

cv available here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/fk4rv959kbuey65/Steel%20CV.pdf

Education

PhD Columbia University, English and Comparative Literature, 2007
MA Western Washington University, 1999
BA The Evergreen State College, 1993

Blog Posts

    Publications

    How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages (Ohio State University Press, 2011)

    EDITED SPECIAL ISSUES

    “Fabulous Animals,” with Holly Dugan, Early Modern Culture 11 (2016)
    “Pearl,” with Nicola Masciandaro, Glossator 9 (2015)

    “The Animal Turn,” with Peggy McCracken. postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 2.1 (2011)

    JOURNAL ARTICLES

    “Introduction: Fabulous Animals.” Early Modern Culture 11 (2016): 46-52 (with Holly Dugan)


     


    “Abyss: Everything is Food.” postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 4.1 (2013): 93-104


     


    “Ridiculous Mourning: Dead Pets and Lost Humans.” In “Animalia” cluster, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 34 (2012): 345-49


     


    “Two Proposals for Increasing Persistence, Exposure, and Humiliation.” Section in “Why We Blog” article, co-written with Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Mary Kate Hurley, and Eileen Joy. Literature Compass 9.12 (2012): 1016–1018 [of 1016-1032]


     


    “The Animal Turn: Into the Sea with the Fish Knights of Perceforest.postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 2.1 (2011): 88-100 (with Peggy McCracken)


     


    “Woofing and Weeping with Animals in the Last Days.” postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 1.1/2 (2010): 187-93


     


    “How to Make a Human.” Exemplaria 20.1 (2008): 3-27


     


     

    Translation, with Christopher Wise. El Hadjj Sekou Tall. “Wanderings: Bamako, Moscow, Delhi.”  Journal of African Travel Writing 8-9 (2000-2001): 77-94


    BOOK CHAPTERS

    Edition and translation. “Prologue to Robert of Greatham, Miroir ou Evangile des domnees,” in Vernacular Literary Theory from the French of Medieval England: Texts and Translations, c. 1120-c. 1450, Eds. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Thelma Fenster, Delbert Russell, (Boydell & Brewer, 2016), 127-35.


     


    “How Delicious We Must Be / Folcuin’s Horse and the Dog’s Gowther, Beyond Care.”


    Fragments towards a History of a Vanishing Humanism, ed. Eileen Joy and Myra Seaman (The Ohio State University Press, 2016), 175-92


     


    “Biopolitics in the Forest.” In The Politics of Ecology: Land, Life, and Law in Medieval Britain, ed. Randy Schiff and Joseph Taylor (The Ohio State University Press, 2016), 33-55


     


    “Creeping Things, Matter’s Endless Generation.” In Elemental Ecocriticism, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 209-36


     


    “Insensate Oysters and Our Nonconsensual Existence.” In Oceanic New York (ed. Steve Mentz, Punctum Books 2015), 79-91


     


    “Touching Back: Responding to Reading Skin.” In Reading Skin in Medieval Literature and Culture, ed. Katie Walter (Palgrave, 2013), 183-95


     


    “A Fourteenth-Century Ecology: ‘The Former Age’ with Dindimus.” In Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts, ed. Carolynne van Dyke (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 185-199.


     


    “With the World, Or Bound to Face the Sky: The Postures of the Wolf-Child of Hesse.” In Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Punctum Books, 2012), 9-34


     


    “Kill Me, Save Me, Let Me Go: Custance, Virginia, Emelye.” In Dark Chaucer, ed. Eileen A. Joy, Nicola Masciandaro, and Myra Seaman (Punctum Books, 2012), 149-58


     


    “Centaurs, Satyrs, and Cynocephali: Medieval Scholarly Teratology and the Question of the Human.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. Asa Mittman and Peter Dendle (Ashgate, 2012), 257-74


     


     

    “The Phoenix and the Turtle / Number There in Love Was Slain.” In Shakesqueer, ed. Madhavi Menon (Duke University Press, 2011), 271-77


    BOOK REVIEW ESSAYS

    “Race, Travel, Time, Heritage,” with Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, postmedieval 6.1 (2015): 98-110


     


    “Against Animal Authenticity, Against the Forced March of the Now: Nicolle Shukin’s Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).Electronic Book Review (4325 words) http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/animal_capital


     


    “First Space; Then, Maybe, Time: On Laurie Shannon’s Accommodated Animal and the Heterogeneous Then.Upstart: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies (November 7, 2013; 4814 words).            http://www.clemson.edu/upstart/Reviews/accomodated_animal/accomodated_animal.xhtml

    Projects

    Current big project is How Not to Make a Human.

    Karl Steel

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    @karlsteel

    Active 8 years, 2 months ago