Masha Raskolnikov received her Phd from the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley in 2002. She is interested in a wide variety of topics in medieval literary culture and contemporary theory: Middle English, Old French and Latin literatures, theories of representation, allegory, medieval philosophy and rhetoric, contemporary critical theory, methods for historicizing sexuality, and the intersections and conflicts within feminist and queer studies. Her publications include "Between Men, Mourning: Time, Love and the Gift in the Roman de la Rose" in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies and "Confessional Literature, Vernacular Psychology, and the History of the Self in Middle English," in Literature Compass, as well as "Pninian Performatives" in a collection called Nabokov at the Limits: Redrawing Critical Boundaries. Her current book project is titled Body Against Soul: Gender and Psychology in Middle English Debate Allegory. It examines the literalization of philosophical dualism that takes place when medieval authors produce personification allegories pitting figures like "Body" and "Soul" against one another in debate, arguing that such debates function as a mode of thinking about psychology, gender and power in the Middle Ages.

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