Professor of English
B.A., M.A. Duke
Ph.D. Virginia

Office:  Chambers 3288  Ext:  2274
email: Gail Gibson

Professor Gibson taught for eight years at Princeton University before coming to Davidson College in 1983, where she is now the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English and Humanities. She is the author of The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago, 1989) and of other studies of medieval and Tudor drama, literature, visual art, and spirituality. She is the medieval editor of the five-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature (2006) and a contributor to both The Blackwell Companion to Tudor Literature, ed. Kent Cartwright (2010) and the forthcoming Regeneration: A Literary History of Europe, 1348-1418, ed. David Wallace (Oxford) . She is completing Childbed Mysteries, a book about late-medieval childbirth as theater, ritual, and social performance. Her current book project, called Medieval Drama in After-Life, is a study of the porous borders of medieval and Early Modern, the cultures of recusancy, and the meaning of possession for antiquarian and recusant collectors of medieval drama manuscripts. Her teaching interests include medieval and Early Modern literature and drama, women's mysticism, the cults of saints, mystery fiction, medieval and contemporary cultural studies, and food writing.

Courses recently taught:

• Senior Colloquium
• Chaucer
• British Literature from the Middle Ages to 1660: The Secret Self
• Studies in Literature and Religion: Mystery and Its Fictions
• Medieval Literature
• Literary Analysis
• Seminar in Women’s Visionary Writing; Seminar on Cult and Culture; Seminar on Feasts and Fasts: The Literature and Culture of Food; Seminar on the Cult of the Virgin Mary; Seminar on Performing Devotion
• English Composition: Food as Symbol, Desire and Spectacle
• Cultures and Civilizations
• Literary Monsters
• Food as Symbol and Spectacle
• British Literature to 1800