Ph.D. and M.A., French Studies, University of Michigan
Ph.D. certificate in Women's Studies, University of Michigan
B.A., University of Wisconsin
Medieval Studies; Feminism & Gender Studies; History of Emotions; Mediterranean Studies; Ecofeminism; Cyborg & Network Theory
Megan Moore is Professor of French, Catherine Paine Middlebush Chair of Romance Languages, and Director of the School of Languages, Literatures & Cultures. A medievalist whose work examines gender, identity, and cross-cultural exchange in the medieval Mediterranean, she focuses particularly on the literatures and cultural objects of the Old French-speaking Mediterranean diaspora in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Her teaching and research center on comparative questions of identity and power, drawing on sources as varied as medieval romance, cyborg film, and posthumanist, trans*, and ecofeminist critique.
Professor Moore is the author of two monographs. The Erotics of Grief: Death, Desire, and Power in Medieval Culture (Cornell University Press, 2021) explores how grief and power are entwined in the formation of privileged communities in the medieval Mediterranean, asking why some grief matters more than others and why some emotional regimes are heard while others are silenced. The book received honorable mention for the 2022 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies and was the subject of an H-France forum. Her first book, Exchanges in Exoticism: Cross-Cultural Marriage and the Making of the Mediterranean in Old French Romance (University of Toronto Press, 2014), shows how women’s work at the edges of empire facilitated economic and ideological exchange across the Mediterranean, focusing on cross-cultural marriages between Byzantium and western Europe.
She is co-editor, with Fatima Moolla of the University of the Western Cape, of The Routledge History of Love in World Literature and Culture (Routledge, 2026), a volume that proposes a worlding of love and grew out of a grant-funded collaboration between the two institutions. She also edited Gender in the Premodern Mediterranean (ACMRS, 2019) and has published on posthumanism, emotion in Byzantine literature, feminist pedagogy, and medieval affect, the last in the second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance.
Her current book project, Strange Figures: Disability, Epistemology, and Ecologies of Resistance in Medieval Romance, brings together feminist ecocriticism, disability studies, trans* studies, and theories of space, including non-representational geography. It reimagines medieval courtliness by showing how non-dominant subjects and their bodies shape space, and how places at the margins, such as the forest and its outcast creatures, are integral to medieval ways of knowing and to the very idea of the court.
Professor Moore also collaborates with Claire Jackson in Koen De Temmerman’s European Research Council–funded Novel Saints project, through MU’s Tri-Continental Partnership, on the place of fiction in narratives from Heliodorus to the Middle Ages.
In the classroom, she challenges students to develop the visual literacy, critical thinking, and writing skills needed to understand how power is constructed around them. Her undergraduate and graduate courses in gender and film studies include French Feminisms in the Age of #MeToo; Francophone Afro-feminisms; Invading Others: Zombies and Epidemics in Film; The Mediterranean and Migration; Feeling Human: Cyborgs and Emotional Exceptionalism in the Posthuman; and Medieval Mediterranean Literature.
Co-edited with Fatima Moolla, University of the Western Cape, 2026.
The collection examines representations of eros across Africa, East Asia, the Middle East, South Asia, Europe, and the Americas, spanning medieval texts to contemporary novels, film, television, visual art, and theatre. Well-known case studies include So Long a Letter, The God of Small Things, The Arabian Nights, The Forty Rules of Love, as well as works by Olive Schreiner, Gabriel García Márquez, Louise Erdrich, and modern Chinese and Japanese fiction. Rather than treating love as timeless or purely personal, contributors show how it is shaped by gender, religion, colonial histories, nationalism, technology, ecology, and changing social norms. The volume explores transgressive, queer, feminist, posthuman, and more-than-human forms of love, revealing love as a powerful force that both sustains and unsettles communities.
Cornell University Press, 2021.
- Honorable mention, Modern Language Association’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies (2023).
- Reviewed in Digital Philology 11.2 (2022): 351-54; Arthuriana 32.2 (2023): 5-6; French Studies 78.1 (2024): 140.
- H-France forum special issue, edited by Andreea Marculescu, dedicated to discussing the book. Reviews by Tracy Adams, University of Auckland; Nuria Silleras-Fernandez, University of Colorado-Boulder; Joseph P. Derosier, Beloit College; Glenn D. Burger, Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.
Focusing on the concept of grief as desire, Moore builds on the history of the emotions and Georges Bataille's theory of the erotic as the conflict between desire and death, one that perversely builds a sense of community organized around a desire for death. The link between desire and death serves as an affirmation of living communities. Moore incorporates literary, visual, and codicological evidence in sources from across the Mediterranean—from Old French chansons de geste, such as the Song of Roland and La mort le roi Artu and romances such as Erec et Enide, Philomena, and Floire et Blancheflor; to Byzantine and ancient Greek novels; to Middle English travel narratives such as Mandeville's Travels.
Newly available as an open access publication.
Drawing upon literary, historical, and visual evidence, this collection of interdisciplinary essays examines how the Mediterranean shaped practices of gender in the premodern era. This volume bridges the gap between gender studies and Mediterranean studies, which have a natural fit with each other in their interest on defining identity carefully through connectivity and attentiveness to cultural hegemonies. The essays in this volume build off of this double approach to offer a unique contribution to the field, and use gender to understand the Mediterranean and the Mediterranean to understand premodern gender.
Reviewed in: Speculum 90.4 (2015):1152-53; Modern Language Review 110.2 (2015): 540-541; French Studies 69.3 (2015): 376; Medium Aevum 84.2 (2015): 347-48; Medieval Feminist Forum 50.1 (2014): 166-68; The Medieval Review 14.10.17; University of Toronto Quarterly 85.3 (2016): 531-32l; Medioevo Greco 16 (2016): 372-76.
Articles & Book Chapters
“Gender in the Premodern Mediterranean” in Gender in the Premodern Mediterranean, edited by Megan Moore. Tempe: Arizona State University Press, 2019. 1-24.
“The Affective Community of Romance: Love, Privilege, and the Erotics of Death in the Mediterranean” in Reading the Late Byzantine Romances, edited by Ingela Nilsson and Adam Goldwyn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 299-320.
“Romancing Death: The Erotics of Grief in the Old French Philomena,” Literature Compass 13.6 (2016): 400-411.
“Using Feminist Pedagogy to Explore Connectivity in the Medieval Mediterranean,” in Teaching Cross-Cultural Encounters, edited by Lynn Shutters and Karina Akbar. New York: Palgrave, 2014. 37-52.
“Hellenism, Islam, and Exoticism in French Medieval Romance,” Journal of Modern Hellenism 28 (2011): 47-74.
“Chrétien’s Romances of Grief: Widows and their Erotic Bodies in Yvain,” in Masculinities and Femininities in the Middle Ages, ed. Fred Kiefer. Turnhout: Brepols, 2010. 101-16.
“The Twenty-First Century Research Center for Sixteenth Century Studies,” The Sixteenth Century Journal XI.1 (2009): 198.
“Boundaries and Byzantines in the Old French Floire et Blancheflor,” Dalhousie French Studies 79 (Summer 2007): 3-20.