Marisa Libbon

Assistant Professor of Literature and Medieval Studies

Marisa Libbon received her PhD, MA, and BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and her M.Phil from the University of Oxford. She specializes in the literature, culture, and book history of medieval England, with particular attention to the early Middle English period (c. 1100–1350). Her research and teaching interests include historiography, hagiography, romance, manuscript studies, textual transmission, and ephemeral culture such as rumor, gossip, and sound. Her essays and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Viator, Notes and Queries, The Auchinleck Manuscript: New Perspectives (ed. Fein), The Chaucer Encyclopedia (ed. Newhauser, et al.), Studies in the Age of Chaucer, The Review of English Studies, and The Medieval Review. Her first book, Talk and Textual Production in Medieval England, was published by The Ohio State University Press in 2021. Her second book in progress, Cultures of Power, asks how the windmill, which first appeared in England c. 1180, impacted the mental landscapes and thus the cultural landscapes of medieval England. She is also a contributor to the European Review of Books. Her work has been supported by the Medieval Academy of America; the Richard III Society, American Branch; Trinity College, Cambridge; and the Newberry Library, where she is a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow for the 2022–23 academic year. In addition to teaching literature and medieval studies at Bard, she is affiliated with Bard’s Experimental Humanities concentration, teaching courses such as “The Book before Print” for students interested in the convergence of medieval studies and the digital humanities.