Associate Professor This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
University Hall 5034
(205) 934-9968

Research and Teaching Interests: Old and Middle English, Old Norse-Icelandic, death and material culture, memory studies, medieval law, medieval women’s studies

Office Hours: By appointment

Education:

• B.A., Truman State University (Phi Beta Kappa)
• M.A., Medieval Institute of Western Michigan University
• Ph.D., University of Illinois

A native of northern Missouri, Jill Hamilton Clements works primarily on Old English language and literature, with research interests in medieval views of death and dying, practices of commemoration, and early medieval law. Her current book project, Writing the Dead in Early Medieval England, examines the interplay of dead bodies and texts in early English commemorative genres, including Northumbrian stone sculpture, and in religious and heroic poetry. Her work has been published in Review of English Studies, Gesta, and in Anglo-Saxon England, and she has contributed chapters in Death in Medieval Europe: Death Scripted and Death Choreographed (Routledge, 2017) and in Dealing with the Dead: Mortality and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Brill, 2018). She also has a piece on teaching gender in Beowulf in the new Teaching Beowulf: Practical Approaches, and has recently begun working on hell-mouths and the motif of "swallowing the damned" in early medieval textual and visual culture. (You can find more information about Dr. Clements’ ongoing work on Academia.edu.)

Clements has taught a range of literature and language courses, including Old English, the history of the English language, and topics courses on "Avengers and Valkyries: Gender in Medieval Epic" and on monsters and monstrosity from Beowulf to Frankenstein. Drawing on her background in art history and material culture, she is particularly interested in interdisciplinary approaches to medieval texts and written artifacts. Students in her literature courses have opportunities to consider issues of language and interpretation alongside visual sources such as maps, stone inscriptions, archaeological finds, and manuscript illuminations. Clements also co-organizes with Dr. Walt Ward in the History Department a regular film night, Dinner+Movie, which features a faculty lecture about the pre-modern world on film. Clements and Ward are the co-directors of the Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies minor.