Faculty Fellow

  • Stacy S. Klein
  • Stacy S. Klein
  • Position: Associate Professor of English and Director of Honors (English Literature)
  • Degree: PhD, Department of English, Ohio State University
  • Specialty: Early Medieval Literature, Gender and Sexuality Studies
  • Bio:  Stacy S. Klein is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University, where she teaches courses on early medieval literature and culture, gender and the history of sexuality, medieval children’s literature, and poetry; she also directs the honors program. Klein is the author of Ruling Women: Queenship and Gender in Anglo-Saxon Literature, which was nominated for the International Society of Early Medieval England’s “Best First Monograph” award, and she has co-authored volumes on early medieval maritime life, visual culture, and the poetics of geography and place. A Burkhardt Fellowship from the ACLS launched her second, nearly completed book project, Militancy and the Formations of Gender in Early English Literature, ca. 700-1100 AD, which examines how cultural obsessions with warfare and violence shape social understandings of gender. Klein has published over forty articles and book chapters on an array of early medieval topics, including premodern disability, queer sexualities, childhood mortality, medieval ecologies, trauma pedagogies, biblical translation, birds, environmental humanism, hagiography, affect, and aesthetics. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the NEH, AAUW, ACLS, IRH at UW–Madison, and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Klein is the past Executive Director of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists and she was recently elected to the MLA Old English Forum Executive Committee. She is also a founding board member of the Colloquium for Early Medieval Studies (CEMS), an international scholarly community committed to fostering intellectual opportunities for anyone interested in early medieval literature. At the 2026-27 RCHA seminar, Klein will develop her research on the aesthetics of warfare and martial masculinity in Old English poetry.