Emily Steiner

Emily Steiner is the A.M. Rosenthal Professor of English. Steiner joined Penn’s Department of English in 1999 and served as the Rose Family Endowed Term Professor of English beginning in 2021 and until her appointment to the Rosenthal Professorship.

A scholar of medieval literature and culture, Steiner’s research interests center upon law and literature, natural history and the history of information, and Jewish-Christian relations in the Middle Ages. Her teaching interests cover the fields of Old English literature, Chaucer, Arthurian literature, alliterative poetry, premodern drama, and poetry of all periods. She is presently teaching a new first-year seminar on Collecting and Collections.

Steiner is author of the books Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature, Reading ‘Piers Plowman’, and John Trevisa’s Information Age: Knowledge and the Pursuit of Literature, c.1400. She has co-edited several collections of essays, and her articles have appeared in many academic journals, such as The Yearbook of Langland Studies, New Medieval Literatures, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, and New Literary History. Her current writing projects include a book entitled Forms of Knowledge: Animals in Medieval Culture, and a new translation of the important fourteenth-century poem, Piers Plowman. Steiner’s ongoing editing projects include a volume on medieval English prose and several volumes on medieval Jews and Judaism.

Recognized for distinguished teaching, Steiner has received several awards, including the Medieval Academy of America’s CARA Teaching Award, the David Delaura Teaching Award, the Alan Filreis Teaching Award, and Penn’s prestigious Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Teaching Award.