Kellie Robertson

Kellie Robertson writes about premodern literatures and cultures; her research and teaching are premised on the idea that a return to this earlier intellectual history can help us to better understand our own modern desires and philosophical commitments.

Her current book project, Yesterday's Weather: The Prehistory of Climate Change, 1300-1800, looks at how medieval and early modern societies depict the shock of the natural disaster during the period of the Little Ice Age. While the weather is notoriously changeable, human responses to it reveal some surprising consistencies across time, as each era struggles to respond to the durable dilemma of being subject to forces beyond human control. The stories we tell about weather, both then and now, are almost always stories about our own modernity, but it is a modernity experienced as somehow precarious. Looking back at how premoderns wrote about the weather helps us to explain more fully the stories that we tell ourselves about climate change today.

Recent projects have centered on environmental humanities, particularly the evolving relationship between humans and nature. With Anke Bernau, she is currently co-editing A Cultural History of Nature in the Medieval Era (under contract with Bloomsbury and due out in 2025). Her monograph Nature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Philosophy
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017) examines late medieval poetry in the context of its physics, arguing that both domains struggled over how to represent nature in the wake of Aristotelian science. Whether or not nature can speak in an autonomous voice is a problem with which modern environmental politics still struggles, and Robertson’s book argues that there is value in returning to medieval models of how the human was understood in relation to the rest of the nonhuman world.

She has a long-standing interest in labor history, Marxist criticism, and materialist philosophies. She is one of the co-authors (as part of the Keywords Project) of an updating of Raymond Williams’ work in Keywords for Today (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Her article “Medieval Materialism: A Manifesto” argues that the Middle Ages has been systematically (and wrongly) omitted from philosophical genealogies of materialism because its views of matter (as hylomorphic and humoral) were considered insufficiently “material” by writers of the Scientific Revolution. She is the author of The Laborer’s Two Bodies: Labor and the ‘Work’ of the Text in Medieval Britain, 1350-1500, a book that explores textual and material responses to the first national labor laws in England. She is also the editor (with Michael Uebel) of a collection of essays entitled The Middle Ages at Work: Practicing Labor in Late Medieval England.

Her research has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Humanities Center.