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Claire Waters Associate Professor of English

Ph.D., Northwestern University, 1998
M.Phil., University of Cambridge, 1993
A.B., Harvard University, 1991

Claire Waters joined the faculty at Davis in 2001, after teaching at the University of New Mexico. She studies late-medieval literature and culture, with particular interests in saints' lives, preaching, Chaucer, manuscript culture and the Old French fabliaux. She is a member of the editorial board of the Broadview Anthology of British Literature.

Selected Honors

• UC President's Research Fellowship in the Humanities, 2004-05
• Rockefeller Foundation residency, Bellagio Study Center, 2001
• Jean H. Hagstrum Dissertation Prize, 1999
• Virgil B. Heltzel Dissertation Year Fellowship, 1996-97
• Fulbright Fellowship to the United Kingdom, 1992-93

Publication Spotlight

Angels and Earthly Creatures: Preaching, Performance, and Gender in the Later Middle Ages by Claire M. Waters "Waters explores fascinating conflicts within the relationship between 'authority' and 'authorization' in the preacher's calling and brings out the consequences of appropriation by women of prerogatives which were jealously guarded as appertaining to an essentially male office. The implications for a reading of Chaucer are considerable, but the book does far more than that. Angels and Earthly Creatures is highly illuminating about medieval culture in general as it raises issues of sinful corporeality and the enormous problems they posed for the theory and practice of preaching." --Alastair J. Minnis, author of Medieval Theory of Authorship

Selected Publications

• "The Labor of Aedificatio and the Business of Preaching in the Thirteenth- Century." Viator 38 (2007), forthcoming.
• "Virgins and Scholars: A Middle English Compilation of the Lives of John the Baptist, John the Evangelist, Jerome, and Katherine of Alexandria." Brepols, forthcoming.
• "Power and Authority," in A Companion to Middle English Hagiography, ed. Sarah Salih. Boydell and Brewer, 2006.
• "Angels and Earthly Creatures: Preaching, Performance, and Gender in the Later Middle Ages" University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

Email: cmwaters@ucdavis.edu