Biography
I am a Teaching Fellow in the English Department at the University of Chicago, where I received my PhD in 2026. My teaching and scholarly work concentrates on literature from the late Middle Ages (1200-1500), medieval religious culture, affect studies (the study of emotions and feelings), poetry, and aesthetic theory.
I am currently working on my first monograph, Estranging Encounters: Literature, Affect, and the Divine in Late Medieval England. In this book, I examine literary representations of divine encounter—that is, the moment of coming face-to-face with God—that result in feelings of estrangement and ambivalence rather than intimacy and transcendence. By analyzing a range of Middle English poems, plays, and mystical texts, I argue that the interplay between affective piety, apophatic theology, and vernacular literature led medieval subjects to conceptualize literature’s aesthetic value in terms of irresolution and indeterminacy. The works I examine include Passion lyrics, Langland’s Piers Plowman, The Book of Margery Kempe, The Croxton Play of the Sacrament, and Chaucer’s The Monk’s Tale and The Prioress’s Tale.
I am also in the early stages of working on a second book project, Laughing to Death: Tragicomedy in the Middle Ages, which turns to the meddling ghosts, comedic deities, and cynical consolations that populate late medieval plays, romances, and dream visions.
I have been involved in various translation and transcription projects. Most recently, I worked with Critical Editions for Digital Analysis and Research (CEDAR), where I helped our team encode several manuscript versions of Piers Plowman into a database for intertextual analysis.
To learn more about my work, you can visit kashafqureshi.com.
Publications
“Defamiliarizing Desire: Affect and Ambivalence in Late Medieval English Literature.” PhD Dissertation, University of Chicago, 2026. https://doi.org/10.6082/9p2gc-bnt48
Review of Communicating the Passion: The Socio-Religious Function of an Emotional Narrative (1250-1530), edited by Pietro Delcono and Holly Johnson. Emotions: History, Culture, Society 10 (2026): 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1163/2208522x-02010251
Review of Medieval Nonsense: Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England, by Jordan Kirk. Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 54 (2023): 245-248. https://doi.org/10.1353/cjm.2023.a912696.
Teaching
The Anxious Middle Ages (Winter 2027)
Medieval Dream Visions (Autumn 2026)
Poetry and the Human (Autumn 2026, Winter 2027)
Medieval Desire (Winter 2025)