Sarah McNamer is Professor of English and Medieval Studies. She was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2026.
Professor McNamer studies how literary texts reflect and produce affective experience in history. Her research also focuses on methods in the history of emotion and on large literary-historical questions like the origins of new genres and aesthetic and affective modes. She is currently writing a book on the Pearl/Gawain poet, Affect and Audience in the Work of the Pearl Poet, which advances a new hypothesis for this elusive poet's cultural location. Other projects include ongoing research on literary and cultural patronage at the court of Edward III and Philippa of Hainault and the Edwardian court as affective community. McNamer’s earlier work focused on how affect works in devotional literature. Her book, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion , received the 2010 Book of the Year award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature. Her critical edition, translation and study, Meditations on the Life of Christ: The Short Italian Text received the 2017 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies.
McNamer received her B.A. from Harvard University, M.Phil. from Oxford University, and Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. She was a Rhodes Scholar at Merton College, Oxford. Other honors and awards include election as Member of the Institute for Advanced Study (School of Historical Studies), Princeton, 2026-27; a Junior Fellowship at the Harvard Society of Fellows; and research fellowships from the American Association of University Women, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Bonnie Wheeler Fellowship Fund, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Australian Research Council's Centre for the History of Emotions. In 2018 she received the Distinguished Achievement in Research Award from Georgetown University. Courses she teaches at the undergraduate and graduate levels include Chaucer, Multilingual Britain, Medieval European Literature, Critical Approaches to World Literature, and Premodern Worlds: A History through Literature and the Arts. From 2017-23 she served as Director of the Global Medieval Studies Program at Georgetown.
For more on Professor McNamer's research, see this interview conducted by the History of Emotions team at Queen Mary Univerity of London.
Academic Appointment(s)
- Primary
- Professor, College - Department of English