Heng, Geraldine
Associate Professor

Education: Ph.D. Cornell 1990
Office Location: PAR 213
Office Hours: M 12:00-3:00
Phone: (512) 471-7480
heng@mail.utexas.edu

Geraldine Heng is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and Director of Medieval Studies.  She is the holder of the Perceval endowment for Medieval Romance, Historiography, and Culture in the College of Liberal Arts, an endowment specially created by a donor to support her research and teaching.

Her teaching has included courses on the literatures and political cultures of the crusades, the genealogies and texts of medieval romance, the literatures of medieval England, Chaucer/s, medieval biography, premodern race and race theory, transcultural medieval travel narratives, and feminist theory and third world feminisms. 

In 2004, she designed and taught in “Global Interconnections: Imagining the World 500-1500 CE,” an experimental interdisciplinary graduate seminar collaboratively taught by seven faculty to introduce an interconnected premodern world spanning Europe, Islamic civilizations, Mahgrebi  and SubSaharan Africa, India, China, and the Eurasian continent.

For a brief description, see the ADFL Bulletin article below, and also:
Medieval Academy
Medieval Studies
Since 2007, she has been founder and co-director of the Global Middle Ages Project (G-MAP) and the Mappamundi online initiative: G-MAP

Geraldine Heng’s research focuses on literary, cultural, and social encounters between worlds, and webs of exchange and negotiation between communities and cultures, particularly when transacted through issues of gender, race, sexuality, and religion.  She is particularly interested in medieval Europe’s discoveries and rediscoveries of Asia and Africa.  Her book, Empire of Magic, traces the development of a privileged medieval  literary genre—European romance—in response to the traumas of the crusades and crusading history, and Europe’s myriad encounters with the East.  She is currently engaged in theorizing premodern race and racial-religious difference.

Select Publications:

Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy, Columbia University Press, 2003. 512+ xii pp. Finalist, First Book award, Modern Language Association of America, 2004. SCMLA Best Book award, 2004.
Empire of Magic


''Cannibalism, the First Crusade, and the Genesis of Medieval Romance,'' differences 10.1, 1998.



''The Romance of England: Richard Coer de Lyon, Saracens, Jews, and the Politics of Race and Nation,'' The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Cohen, Garland, 2000.



''A Woman Wants: The Lady, Gawain, and the Forms of Seduction,'' Yale Journal of Criticism, 5:3, 1992.



''Feminine Knots and the Other Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,'' PMLA, May 1991.



''State Fatherhood: The Politics of Nationalism, Sexuality, and Race in Singapore'', Nationalisms and Sexualities, eds. Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, Patricia Yeager, Routledge 1991 (republished seven times; translated into other languages).



'''A Great Way to Fly': Women, Nationalism, and the Varieties of Feminism in SE Asia,'' Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, eds. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade, Mohanty, Routledge, 1996 (republished, translated).

Select Publications in 2006-8:

“The Race Template.” Cloning Cultures.  eds. Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg. Duke University Press, 2008.

“An Experiment in Collaborative Humanities: ‘Global Interconnections: Imagining the World 500-1500.’” ADFL Bulletin, Modern Language Association of America, 38:3, 2007.

Jews, Saracens, 'Black Men,' Tartars: England in a World of Racial Difference, 13th- 15th Centuries.''

A Companion to Medieval English Literature, c. 1350-c. 1500. ed. Peter Brown, Blackwell, 2005.



''Music to My Ears: Pleasure, Resistance, and Feminist Aesthetics in Reading.'' Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory. ed. Ellen Rooney. Cambridge UP, 2006.

Book in Progress:

The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages

Awards and Honors:

Dr. Heng has held research fellowships at the Stanford Humanities Center, Brown University’s Pembroke Center, the University of California's Humanities Research Institute, and the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Research in the Humanities. She co-founded, and is former Associate Director of the University of Texas Humanities Institute, and currently serves on the Executive Committee of the Comparative Studies in Medieval Literature Division of the Modern Language Association, and on the Steering Committee of HASTAC (the Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory).