Raskolnikov, Masha

Associate Professor

research

research and scholarship focus

  • Middle English literature
  • Allegory theory
  • Medieval philosophy and rhetoric
  • Contemporary critical theory
  • Feminist and queer studies

affiliations

faculty appointment in

member of graduate field

other Cornell affiliations

works in

teaching

recent courses taught

The Question of Feminist and Queer Criticism in Premodern Studies       
Dream Visions and the Question of the Medieval Unconscious
Death of the Author, Birth of the Author: Literary Theory Medieval and Modern
Latin Allegory and Vernacular Authority in the Middle Ages
Transgender and Transsexuality
Medieval and Renaissance Drama
Chaucer                           
Sin, Confession and the ‘Invention of the Self’
The Suffering Body in the Middle Ages

service

current professional activities

  • Conference organizer, "TransRhetorics" Cornell University, March 2009
  • Conference organizer, "Conversations in Feminist Theory" Cornell University, Spring 2003
  • Conference organizer: "What is a First Book?" Cornell University, Fall 2003
    Doctoral Committee Chair: Patricia Har. 
    Dissertation Committee Member: John Sebastian (Phd 2004); Jacqueline Stuhmiller (Phd 2005), Misty Urban (Phd 2007), Angela Furry, Jamie Friedman, Corey Wronski. Melissa Winders, Will Rogers.

background

educational background

  • Rhetoric Department, University of California, Berkeley, Ph.D., 2002
  • Rhetoric Department, University of California, Berkeley, M.A., 1996
  • Wesleyan University, B.A., 1995

awards and distinctions

  • Appel Fellowship, Cornell University, 2009.
  • President's Council of Cornell Women Affinito-Stewart Grant, 2004-2005
  • American Council of Learned Socieites (ACLS) Fellowship, 2003-2004
  • Fellow, Cornell University Mellon Seminar on Gender & Sexuality, 2003-2004
  • Fellow, Society for the Humanities, 2003-04 University of Pennsylvania Mellon Fellowship (declined) 2002
  • Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellowship, Selected Finalist (declined) 2002
  • Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, Una’s Fellowship 2001-2002
  • Summer Research Fellowship, University of California, Berkeley 2001
  • Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, UC Berkeley, 2001

featured in

publications

selected publications (listing in progress)

Book: Body Against Soul: Gender and Sowlehele in Middle English Allegory (Interventions Series: Ohio State University Press, July 2009)
  • Through a reading of Piers Plowman, the Katherine Group's "Sawles Warde," and the popular but little-studied thirteenth-century debates between the Body and the Soul, I argue that Middle English allegory participates in the construction of a quotidian psychological discourse about the workings of the self.  This discourse is often intimately concerned with whether the allegorized aspects of the anatomized self are to be gendered "male" or "female" and with how gender impacts relationships between aspects of the self, fraught as they are with the erotics and struggles of establishing the kind of hierarchies that lead to a well-balanced life.  This study crosses the artificially-constructed boundary between an academic history of psychology as a discipline, and the cultural studies of the history of “the self” to examine a category that moderns might call “self-help” and that medieval thinkers and manuscript-compilers tended to call sowlehele.

Articles

  • "Promising the Female, Delivering the Male: Transformations of Gender in Piers Plowman" The Yearbook of Langland Studies 19, Spring 2006.
  • "Confessional Literature, Vernacular Psychology and the History of the Self in Middle English" Literature Compass 2 (2005) ME 128, 1-20.
  • "Between Men, Mourning: Time, Love and the Gift in the Roman de la Rose" GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10.1 (Winter 2004), pp. 47-75.
  • "Pninian Performatives" in Nabokov at the Limits: Redrawing Critical Boundaries ed. Lisa Zunshine (New York: Garland Academic Publishers, 1999): 127- 161.

Book Reviews:

  • Nelly Richard, Masculine/Feminine: Practices of Difference(s), trans. Silvia R. Tandeciarz and Alice A. Nelson, in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 11. 3 (2005). 479-481.
  • Thelma S. Fenster and Clare A. Lees, eds., Gender in Debate from the Early Middle Ages to the Renaissance, in The Medieval Review, Fall 2003
  • Michel Foucault, "Il Faut Défendre la Société" in Critical Sense: a journal of political and cultural theory. Spring 1998 Special Issue, "Formations of Race and Nation"

talks and presentations

  • “Queering Authorship in Piers Plowman” SEMA Conference, October 2008.
  • “Transgendering Pride in Piers Plowman C,” 42nd Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 2008.
  • “The Four Daughters of God and the Trouble with Gender” 4th International Piers Plowman Conference, Philadelphia, PA, May 17-19th 2007.
  • “Body/Soul Debate and Transgender Autobiography,” Resisting Medicine, Re/modeling Gender, English Department Colloquium, Cornell University, October 2006.
  • "The Voice Within Is Always Female: Misogyny, Materiality and the Daughers of God Trope" 40th Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI May 2005
  • "How Soul Joined With Body: Allegorical Goddesses and the Question of Embodiment" University of Pennsylvania Medieval/Renaissance Colloquium (invited speaker).
  • Panel Organizer, "Debate Poetry and the Poetics of Disputation" at the 39th Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI May 2004