Areas of Expertise and Research Interests:

Undergraduate Courses:

French literature from 1000 to 1500                     

Medieval courtly literature and the development of vernacular prose

Comparative poetics

Women authors, with special emphasis on Christine de Pizan

Theories of medieval auctoritas and (post)modern authorship

The letter as literary and rhetorical form; epistolary fiction

Translation theory

Critical theory

FRW 3001 Intro to the Study of Literature in French

FRW 3100 French Literature and Civilization of the Middle Ages and Renaissance

FRW 4413 La Femme Médiévale: Representations of Women in the Medieval French Tradition

FRW 4414 L’Amour Courtois: Politics of the Heart

LIT 4930 The Middle Ages through Film

Graduate Courses:

FRW 6418 L’Auteur Médiéval

FRW 6938 Débattre la Renaissance: Folie, Fureur, Femme

FRW 6938 Christine de Pizan

LIT 6066 Intro to the Comparative Study of Lit.

LIT 6934    Problematics of Medieval Language and Literature

LIT 6934 History of the Book

Professor Munson’s research focuses on the dual problematics of author and nation in late medieval literature, with particular emphasis paid to the feminine body as privileged site through which epistemological changes and ruptures are articulated in European literary, intellectual, and political history. She is the past recipient of a Borchard Foundation Fellowship to conduct manuscript research at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and in 2003 she received a Research Time Release Award from the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters to complete a book manuscript entitled Spheres of Influence: Celestial and Textual Politics in Christine de Pizan. Professor Munson was also the recipient of the 2003-2004 Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award.

Professor Munson's most recent publications include “Destruire et Disperser: Violence and the Fragmented Body in Christine de Pizan’s Prose Letters” in Violence in Medieval Courtly Literature: A Casebook, ed. Albrecht Classen (New York: Routledge, 2004): 269-96; and “Eclipsing Desire: Masculine Anxiety and the Surrealist Muse,” French Forum 29.2 (Spring 2005): 19-33.