Overview
Adin Lears is a scholar of literary and medieval studies whose work examines the roles of sensation, affect, embodiment, and language in medieval theories of knowledge and their cultural and social contexts, especially those related to gender and sexuality. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she teaches courses in English and medieval studies, and contributes to the interdisciplinary PhD program in Media, Art, and Text. Adin’s work on Old and Middle English literature has appeared in a variety of journals and edited volumes, including Studies in the Age of Chaucer and Viator, among others. Her first book, World of Echo: Noise and Knowing in Late Medieval England (Cornell University Press, 2020) shows how medieval thinkers conceived of the experience and expression of lay understanding in terms of noise, amplifying the history of cultural and social hierarchies around aesthetic experience and giving voice to alternate ways of knowing. Her most recent work situates the repetitive devotional techniques of fourteenth and fifteenth-century English mystics in relation to medieval conceptions of “mechanical” knowledge and explores how they offer ways of thinking through more ethical social and environmental ecologies.
Research Focus
Big Science: Craft-Knowledge and Creature Futures in the Age of Chaucer
Adin’s new project at Cornell’s Society for the Humanities, Big Science: Craft-Knowledge and Creature Futures in the Age of Chaucer follows from her first book in its investigation of crucial questions of being and knowing at the intersection of language and aesthetic experience, extending such inquiries into the history of science and technology by turning to medieval craft and “making,” both technical and artistic. This work probes how premodern thinkers were keenly aware of technology’s capacity for alienation and explores how they oriented themselves toward tools, including language, in ways that were both ethical and joyful. Through this investigation, Big Science carves out space for language and poetics in contemporary theoretical treatments of technology and adds a premodern historical perspective to scholarship exploring the cognitive and social effect of media and textual form.