Zuzanna Wołodko is a PhD student in English at the University of Chicago, studying the literature of the late Middle Ages (Middle English, French, and Latin). Her current interests center on the role medieval romance played in transmitting classical scientific learning – looking in particular to the romances of antiquity that incorporated passages from, or were bound together with scientific texts, and thereby associated scientific knowledge with paganism and fiction. As such, her research engages the scholarship concerned more broadly with medieval historiography and with discourses of religious alterity.
She has written on the figure of the monstrous child in medieval romance; the reception of the armillary sphere as a premodern fetish; the mystical cartography of Opicinus de Canistris; the alchemical digression in the Roman de la Rose; and on nonsense in medieval religious plays as a mode of iconoclastic critique.
She co-coordinates the Medieval Studies Workshop.