Ph.D., Yale University, 2001
M.A., Georgetown University, 1995
A.B., Harvard University, 1989

For the 2009-10 year, Seeta Chaganti is a Faculty Fellow at Cornell University's Society for the Humanities. She joined the faculty of the UC Davis English department in 2001. She specializes in Old and Middle English poetry and its intersections with material artifacts, including sculpture, metalwork, and wall painting. Her current research focuses on poetic and visual representations of dance in the late Middle Ages. Media, performance, and movement studies, along with poststructuralism and theories of poetics, all inform her perspective on the Middle Ages as deeply as do historicist methodologies.

The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary: Enshrinement, Inscription, Performance

Reliquaries, elaborate containers housing the remains of the holy dead, informed numerous aspects of medieval culture. Incorporated into religious ceremonies, they contributed to the voiced, world-creating work of performance. At the same time, their decoration often included inscription, silent and self-referential. In the reliquary, silent inscription and spoken performance enshrined one another to produce a visual commentary upon representation. Using texts by Chaucer, along with anonymous plays, lyrics, and hagiographic verse, The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary shows how the reliquary's visual language explicated the representational processes of late-medieval English poetry.

Selected Publications:

• "Vestigial Signs: Inscription, Performance, and The Dream of the Rood," forthcoming in PMLA (January 2010).
• "Carol"; "Ut Pictura Poesis," forthcoming in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.
• "Choreographing Mouvance: The Case of the English Carol," Philological Quarterly 87.1&2 (2008): 77-103.
• The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary: Enshrinement, Inscription, Performance. New York: Palgrave, 2008.
• "'A Form as Grecian Goldsmiths Make': Enshrining Narrative in Chrétien de Troyes's Cligés and the Stavelot Triptych," New Medieval Literatures 7 (2005): 163-201.
• Review of Logan E. Whalen, Marie de France and the Poetics of Memory, on H-France: http://www.h-france.net/vol9reviews/vol9no68chaganti.pdf
  
• Review of Catherine A. M. Clarke, Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700-1400, The Journal of British Studies 47 (2008): 151-52.
• Review of Diane Watt, ed., The Paston Letters, and of Larissa Tracy, ed., Women of the Gilte Legende, Medieval Feminist Forum 40 (2005): 150-53, 166-70.

Email: schaganti@ucdavis.edu