Biography
Kashaf is a PhD Student in English at the University of Chicago. She is particularly interested in how discontinuity, lack, and resistances to closure work as formal and aesthetic effects across various late medieval genres spanning confessional and penitential literature, Middle English and Latin lyric, mysticism, and allegory. She is also interested in the longue durée of theory and poetry that negotiates the inextricable relationship between the self, desire, and failure, thinking about the intellectual arch between thinkers like Augustine, Donne, Freud, and Derrida. Because of this, questions about anachronism—including what it means to talk about “modernity” versus "alterity" in the Middle Ages, or the relationship between “theory” and the (premodern) text—are important to her work.
Her writing has focused on speculative embodiment and disorienting affect in the bizarre hagiography of Christina Mirabilis; the dysphoric nature of gender and sexuality in the Roman de silence; and the dynamics of belief and uncertainty in Augustine, deconstruction, and postmodernism. More recently, her archival research on miracle stories contained in fourteenth–century manuscripts has led her to consider how sensationalism operates in narratives of transgression and redemption.
Currently, she is working on a translation and edition of the complete poems of Gerald of Wales. She is also the research assistant for the Piers Plowman project at Critical Editions for Digital Analysis and Research (CEDAR).