Undergraduate Humanities Forum Director
A. M. Rosenthal Professor of English

Emily Steiner is the A. M. Rosenthal Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, the Faculty Director of the Wolf Undergraduate Humanities Forum, and a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America. She received her BA from Brown University and her PhD from Yale. She is the author of Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge, 2003), Reading 'Piers Plowman' (Cambridge, 2013), and John Trevisa's Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c.1400 (Oxford, 2021). She has co-edited several collection of essays, and her articles have appeared in The Yearbook of Langland Studies, New Medieval Literatures, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Representations, New Literary History, and Exemplaria, among many other journals.

She is presently writing a book on animals in premodern literature and culture, editing a volume on medieval English prose for Oxford University Press (with Sebastian Sobecki), and editing several volumes on medieval Jews and Judaism (with Samantha Seal). With Tekla Bude and Michael Calabrese she has recently completed a translation of Piers Plowman. Her research and teaching interests extend to natural history and the history of information, law and literature, drama and ritual performance, and Jewish-Christian relations in the Middle Ages.

Professor Steiner has won several teaching awards, including the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching (2016) and the CARA Award for Excellence in Teaching from the Medieval Academy of America (2018).