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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.

  • Select Publications
    • "Gender and Identity in Beowulf." Teaching Beowulf: Practical Approaches. Ed. Aaron Hostetter and Larry Swain. (Kalamazoo: MIP/De Gruyter, 2024), 221-246.
    • “Swallowed and Forgotten: Christ III and the Mouth of Hell in Early English Literature.” Sources of Knowledge: Studies in Old English and Anglo-Latin Literature in Honour of Charles D. Wright. Edited by Stephanie Clark, Shannon Godlove, Janet S. Ericksen. (Brepols, 2023), 399-422.
    • “Warnings from the Grave: Necromancy, Talking Bones, and the Final Marvel of The Wonders of the East.” Review of English Studies 73 (2022): 615–31.
    • "Sudden Death in Early Medieval England and the Anglo-Saxon Fortunes of Men," in Dealing with the Dead: Mortality and Community in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Thea Tomaini, (Brill, 2018), 36-67.
    • "Writing and Commemoration in Anglo-Saxon England," in Routledge History of Death in Medieval Europe: Death Scripted and Death Choreographed, ed. Joëlle Rollo-Koster (Routledge, 2017), 9-39.
    • “Reading, Writing and Resurrection: Cynewulf’s Runes as a Figure of the Body,” Anglo-Saxon England 43 (2014): 133-54.
    • “The Construction of Queenship in the Illustrated Estoire de Seint Aedward le Rei,” Gesta 52 (No. 1, 2013): 21-42.
  • Recent Courses
    • Themes in Literature: Monsters and the Monstrous
    • Literature of the Vikings
    • Avengers and Valkyries: Gender in Medieval Epic (Pre-1800 Special Topics)
    • Medieval Culture
    • Beowulf in Context
    • Introduction to Old English
    • History of the English Language
  • Academic Distinctions and Professional Societies
    • Phi Beta Kappa
    • Medieval Academy of America
    • International Center of Medieval Art
    • Southeastern Medieval Association