Dr. Virginia Blanton is Curators’ Distinguished Professor of English. Her research focuses on representations of female saints in the religious culture of medieval England and on medieval women and their relationship with books, as writers, readers, patrons, and book owners. Dr. Blanton is author and editor of the three-volume series Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe (2013-2017) and an award-winning monograph, Signs of Devotion: The Cult of St. Æthelthryth in Medieval England, 695-1615 (2007). She is a founding member of the multidisciplinary NEH-funded team, CODICES, which conducts optical, chemical, and computational analyses of manuscripts and early printed books. She is also affiliate faculty with UMKC's Center for Digital and Public Humanities. Dr. Blanton leads an international digital humanities initiative, Cantorales in the Americas and Beyond, which is to catalogue choir books made in Spain between 1200-1800 that are now in other parts of the world. This research team includes musicologists, archivists, book historians, and graduate and undergraduate students.
Ph.D. in English and Graduate Certificate in Medieval Studies, Binghamton University
The Arthurian legend, medieval women, and book history