Shannon Gayk
Department of English
Expert Bio
Shannon Gayk, associate professor in the Department of English and director of the Medieval Studies Institute at IU Bloomington, is a scholar of late-medieval religious writing and culture. She also specializes in ecocriticism and nature writing, and writing about place and pilgrimage.
Her first book, “Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth Century England” (Cambridge, 2010), focused on visual art, vernacular literature and the rhetoric of religious reform in 15th-century England. She is currently completing three books. The first, “Instruments of Christ,” considers the social, formal and theological uses of the arma Christi in image and text from eighth-century liturgical expressions to 18th-century protestant hymns. The second, “Apocalyptic Ecologies,” examines representations of ecological catastrophe and environmental apocalypticism in late medieval and early modern Europe. The third is a small book of personal essays on medieval holy places in the modern world, provisionally titled “Saunter: Medieval Pilgrimages in Modern England.”
Areas of Expertise
Late Medieval English literature, art and religious culture; pilgrimage and travel writing nature writing; premodern representations of environmental catastrophe.
