Geraldine Heng

Geraldine Heng is Mildred Hajek Vacek and John Roman Vacek Chair in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin, and cross-appointed to/an affiliate of: Middle Eastern studies, Women’s studies, Jewish Studies, and the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Social Justice. 

She is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy, and coeditor of the Cambridge University Press Elements series in the Global Middle Ages, and the University of Pennsylvania Press series, RaceB4Race: Critical Studies of the Premodern, and Founder and Director of the Global Middle Ages Projects (G-MAP).

Her research focuses on literary, cultural, and social encounters between worlds, and webs of exchange and negotiation between communities and cultures, particularly when transacted through issues of race, gender, sexuality, class, and religion. She is especially interested in medieval Europe’s discoveries and rediscoveries of Asia and Africa.

Heng’s books include Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy, which traces the development of a medieval literary genre; The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, which explores how religion distributed positions and power in the medieval period differentially to groups; and The Global Middle Ages: An Introduction, the first title in the Cambridge Elements series in the Global Middle Ages.

Heng’s articles have appeared in PMLA, MLN, differences, Literature Compass, Genders, the Yale Journal of Criticism, and Exemplaria, among other journals. She has held eight fellowships at centers and institutes.

Her teaching has included courses on early global literatures, premodern race, critical race theory, the literatures and cultures of the crusades, medieval European romance, the literatures of medieval England, Chaucer/s, medieval biography, transcultural medieval travel narratives, and feminist theory and international feminisms.