Patricia Dailey specializes in medieval literature and culture (English, Dutch, French, and Italian) and critical theory, focusing on women’s mystical texts, visions, Anglo-Saxon poetry and prose, medieval rhetoric, hermeneutics, and theology. Professor Dailey has written on Hadewijch, Julian of Norwich, Marguerite Porete, Hildegard von Bingen, Old English riddles, The Letter from Alexander to Aristotle, The Ruin, and Beowulf, among others.
Her book Promised Bodies: Time, Language, and Corporeality in Women’s Mystical Texts (Columbia University Press, 2013) examines the relation between gender, temporality, the body, and language in medieval mystical texts, with a focus on the thirteenth century mystic Hadewijch. Her next book project, The Witness in the Text, focuses on Anglo-Saxon literature and theology. She is also the co-editor, with Veerle Fraeters, of A Companion to Hadewijch (Brill, 2014). Her next book project, Responsive Subjects: Exteriority and Anglo-Saxon Literature, focuses on Anglo-Saxon literature and theology.
In addition to her work in medieval literature, she has translated works by Giorgio Agamben (The Time That Remains, Stanford 2005), Jean-François Lyotard, Antonio Negri, and Eric Alliez. She is the founder of the Anglo-Saxon Studies Colloquium and co-founder of the Theory Reading Group.