DR. Lucy Fleming
Postdoctoral Researcher
Pronouns: she/her
Room: Werthmannstr. 6, Room 00 006
Office phone number: –
Email: lucy.fleming@anglistik.uni-freiburg.de
Dr. Lucy Fleming is a postdoctoral researcher on the European Research Council–funded project DERIVATE, led by Prof. Dr. Eva von Contzen. Her first monograph explores the treatment of sexuality in retellings for children of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare, a topic intertwined with poetic identity, nationalism, authorship, and hermeneutic justice. Her teaching has covered feminist theory, modern literature, and writing, and she is also interested in the process of secular exegesis and the relationship between literature and science.
Lucy earned her doctorate in English at New College, Oxford, and also holds a master’s degree in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Oxford and a bachelor’s degree from Yale. Previously, she was the postdoctoral researcher on the Swiss National Science Foundation Eccellenza Project ‘Canonicity, Obscenity, and the Making of Modern Chaucer’ (COMMode) at the University of Bern, Switzerland.
Research interests:
- Chaucer, Shakespeare, and canon formation
- Medieval English literature
- Children’s literature and retellings for children
- Feminist theory and women’s writing
- Histories of age, generational memory, and matrescence
- Complexity science and the dialogue between science and the humanities
Employment:
2025-present: | Postdoctoral Researcher |
2024-2025 | Postdoctoral Researcher |
Awards and Grants:
- Rowden Scholarship, New College, University of Oxford (2019–2023)
- Kathryn M. Karrer Award, Western Michigan University Medieval Institute (2022)
- Critical-Thinking Community Grant for “Teaching and Translating Taboo,” TORCH (The
Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities) (2022) - University of Bern Fund for the Promotion of Young Researchers Grant for “Adapting Violence
in/from ‘Classic’ Texts” (2022, with A.E. Brown)
Selected Publications
- “K-I-S-S-I-N-G: Transforming Erotic Obscenity in Children’s Adaptations of The Merchant’s Tale, 1930–2008,” The Chaucer Review vol. 60, no. 2 (2025): 225–250.
- “Chaucer ‘for children.’” Encyclopedia of the Global Middle Ages, ed. Danna Messer (ARC Humanities Press, 2024).
- “Censoring.” With Mary C. Flannery. The Routledge Companion to the History of the Book in Medieval Western Europe, 650 to 1550, ed. James D. Sargan and Hannah Ryley (Routledge, forthcoming).
- “Pleyyng with May’s Age in Oxford, New College MS 314,” New College Notes 20 (2023).
- “Safe and Unsafe Violence in Victorian and Edwardian Children’s Chaucer’s.” Violent Victorian Medievalisms, ed. Mary Boyle (Taylorian Institution Press, 2022).
- Reviews for The Times Literary Supplement: A.L. Avery, Reynard the Fox (2020); V.S. Vernon Jones et al., Aesop’s Fables (2020); K. Langrish, From Spare Oom to War Drobe (2021); M. Tatar, The Heroine with 1,001 Faces (2021); E. Garner, Lost & Found: A Treasure Trove of Folk Tales (2022); S. Leith, The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading (2024); K. Poole, Philip Pullman and the Historical Imagination: Seventeenth-Century Science, Literature, and Religion in His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust (2025).
Selected Conference Papers
- “‘The dirtiest story I know’: Chaucerian Obscenity, chrononormativity, and The Big Bang Theory.” Chaucer in the Age of Medievalism, University of Lorraine, Nancy, France. November 2025.
- “The Girlhood of Chaucer’s Heroines: Reading For and Against Numerical Age in The Canterbury Tales.” New Chaucer Society Biennial Congress, Pasadena, Ca., July 2024.
- “‘Oh my feathers, a bum!’: Obscenity, Sex, and Violence in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale ‘for Children.’” International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Mich., May 2024.
- “Chaucer Has Entered the Chat: Using Conversational AI to Introduce Chaucer to a Wider Audience.” With Marion Turner. Medieval Academy of America Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C., February 2023.
- “‘A Very Bad Thing’: Rewriting Rape in Children’s Adaptations of the Wife of Bath’s Tale.” New Chaucer Society Biennial Congress, Durham, July 2022.
- “‘A Thirsty Evil’: Measure for Measure, Consent, and Literary Approaches to Twenty-First-Century Sex Education.” Renaissance Society of America Conference, Dublin, March 2022.
Teaching:
- The English Canon and the Child Reader (winter term 2024)
- Introduction to Feminist Thought (2020–2023)
- Creating Race, Premodern to Modern (teaching assistant to Profs. Joe Moshenska and Lorna
Hutson, 2022) - Shakespeare (2020)