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Harris takes a deep dive into the history of the word “wench” from a Black feminist perspective, focusing on how it became a derogatory term naming a woman who was young, single, socio-economically disadvantaged, and sexually available. Paying particular attention to “wench maternity,” it frames its discussion through the lens of Dobbs vs Jackson Women’s Health Organization, showing how the concepts embodied by the wench are central to Supreme Court’s decision and it looks ahead to the potential futures that the medieval wench embodies.
Dr. Carrisa M. Harris, Associate Professor, English | Temple University
Professor Harris’s research and teaching focus on gender and sexuality in medieval England and Scotland. She earned her Ph.D. from Northwestern University and her B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis. In 2016, she won Temple’s CLA Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation), and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Her first book, Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain (Cornell University Press, 2018), analyzes sexual education, consent, and rape culture from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to the Access Hollywood tape. Obscene Pedagogies won the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship’s 2020 biennial prize for Best First Book of Medieval Feminist Scholarship. Her current book project is titled The Poetics of Rage: Women’s Anger, Misogyny, and Political Power in Premodern Britain. She is co-editor, with Sarah Baechle and Elizaveta Strakhov, of a volume of essays and medieval poems titled Rape Culture and Female Resistance in Late Medieval Literature (Penn State University Press, 2022). Her contributions to the volume include an edition of sixteen medieval pastourelles and rape songs specifically tailored for the undergraduate classroom as well as an essay about intersectionality and survival.
She is an editor for the journal Exemplaria: Medieval, Early Modern, Theory and lead medieval editor for The Sundial (a public-facing digital publication by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies) as well as an editorial board member for Medieval Institute Publications’ Premodern Transgressive Literatures series and The Chaucer Review. She is currently the chair for the MLA Chaucer Forum’s Executive Committee, a trustee of the New Chaucer Society, and a member of the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship’s advisory board. Her work has been published in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Journal of the Early Book Society, New Literary History, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Review of English Studies, Chaucer Review, the Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales, and MedievaFeminist Forum. She also writes public-facing essays on topics such as medieval rape culture, the history of “Teen Mom” entertainment programming, medieval drug-facilitated sexual assault, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, medieval impotence trials, and the history of the word “wench” for outlets including Avidly, Slate, Vox, Electric Literature, The Washington Post, Narratively, and others.