Education

• Ph.D. English, Cornell University
• M.A. English, Queens College, CUNY
• B.A. Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Vassar College

Research Interests

Adin Lears works on the literature of late medieval England as well as the histories of ideas and culture that precede and surround it, with particular interest in the ways gender has historically shaped Western understandings of knowing, being, and embodiment. Her approach to scholarship combines historically informed close reading with contemporary theory to ask how  studying the Middle Ages might deepen our understanding of contemporary life and offer new paradigms for addressing its social and political problems. Her first book, World of Echo: Noise and Knowing in Late Medieval England (Cornell University Press, 2020) draws on historical sound studies to expand scholarly understandings of literacy and the place of non-representational sound in medieval literary culture by showing how medieval thinkers understood noise as an embodied experience of language. Lears’s current book project charts a previously unexamined medieval history of vitalism, situating early conceptions of life in a deep history of thinking on the category of the human. This work has informed her commitment to thinking through the ethical and political challenges of healthcare from a feminist angle, particularly on issues like abortion. At VCU’s Humanities Research Center, she is co-director of the Spirituality, Care, and Culture lab, which seeks to situate the current healthcare and wellness landscape within a broad range of cultural and historical contexts and show how the humanities offer skills crucial to care work, broadly defined.

At VCU, Lears’s impulse to probe big questions through embodied experience informs her teaching where she seeks student-centered approaches grounded in the body, the senses, and the processes of cognition they enable. She teaches texts from the visionary literature of medieval women like Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe to the medieval poetry of social complaint by authors like Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland, supplementing inquiry with attention to scientific works like the Middle English gynecological text The Sickness of Women and the encyclopedic work, On the Properties of Things, as well as premodern art and other media on related topics. By integrating contemporary fiction, poetry, theory, and public writing into her teaching, Lears asks students to consider points of continuity between the Middle Ages and contemporary life as well as to imagine how the strangeness and difference of the Middle Ages might help us to reshape our world today.

More Information

Adin Lears' faculty page (VCU Department of English)