Kashaf Qureshi

Kashaf Qureshi
Cohort Year: 2020
Research Interests: Middle English Literature; Medieval Religious Culture; History of Religion and Secularism; Affect Studies; Aesthetic Theory
Education: B.A., English with minor in Latin, Reed College (2020). M.A., English, University of Chicago, (2021).

Biography

My work primarily focuses on Latin and English literature from the late Middle Ages (1200-1500). I research and teach topics related to literary voice, affect, and desire, ranging from medieval and early modern forms to modern critical theory. 

From 2025-26, I am completing my dissertation, “Defamiliarizing Desire: Affect and Ambivalence in Late Medieval English Literature,” under the Mellon Foundation-University of Chicago Dissertation Completion Fellowship. Set during a period of proliferating debate among religious authorities and everyday people over how one ought to feel as a spiritual subject,my dissertation contends that Middle English poets, mystics, and playwrights transformed religious literature from a tool of emotional instruction into a site of aesthetic indeterminacy. I analyze an archive of 13th-15th-century vernacular literature that “defamiliarizes desire” by rendering affective experiences that are inconclusive, anticlimactic, and playfully obscure. This includes the lyric dialogue Stond Wel, Moder, Ounder Rode, the allegorical dream-vision Piers Plowman, the mystical writings of Walter Hilton and Margery Kempe, and various mystery plays. My project advances a broader understanding of medieval affect while arguing that the estranging ambitions of medieval religious literature warrant significant consideration in the history of aesthetic experiments.

From 2022-2024, I was the research assistant for the Piers Plowman project at Critical Editions for Digital Analysis and Research (CEDAR), and I served as the co-coordinator of the University of Chicago’s Medieval Studies Workshop from 2022-2025. I am also part of ongoing collaborative project to transcribe and translate Gerald of Wales’ Latin poetry.

Publications

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.

CONFERENCE PAPERS

“Maternal Desire/Maternal Disruption: The Lyric Dialogues of Christ and Mary”, MLA 2025

“‘No Joye in the Felyng’, or, Margery Kempe’s Mistrust”, New Chaucer Society Congress 2024

“Defamiliarizing Affect in The Scale of Perfection”, Sewanee Medieval Colloquium 2024

Teaching

Winter 2025: Instructor of Record, Medieval Desire

Winter 2024: Course Assistant, The Fundamentals of Literary Criticism (Sianne Ngai)

Autumn 2023: Course Assistant, Shakespeare II: Tragedies and Romances (Timothy Harrison)

Summer 2023: Teaching Assistant, Beyond Anthropocentrism: Animals and Ethics (Daisy Delogu)

Spring 2023: Course Assistant, Medieval English Literature (Mark Miller)