Tekla Bude
Moreland Hall 222
2550 SW Jefferson Way
Corvallis, OR 97331
United States
Tekla Bude specializes in late medieval literature. Her research focuses on the ways medieval writers were influenced by and influenced the study of music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy -- what medieval scholars would have called the quadrivium and what we might think of as the study of numbers. Her first book, Sonic Bodies (UPenn, 2022) investigates forms of "silent" or "metaphysical" music in English literature from 1300-1550. It won the Anne Middleton Book Prize in 2023. Her second book, in progress, is on the mathematical imagination in late medieval literature.
Tekla received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2013. From 2013-2016, she was Kathleen Hughes Junior Research Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she began work on a second project on the conceptualization of mathematical principles in medieval poetry, theology, and devotional texts. Her work has appeared in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, The Chaucer Review, and the Yearbook of Langland Studies.
Mathematics and Literature
Medieval Literature
Music and Literature
Medieval Philosophy and Theology
Queer Theory
Science and Literature
Women's, Gender, and Sexuality
PhD, University of Pennsylvania (2013)
MA, University of Oxford (2007)
BA, University of Michigan (2006)
Please see my CV for my latest publications and awards.
I teach broadly across Medieval Literature and related fields. In addition to teaching 200-level courses in Early British Literature and Shakespeare, I also teach a rotation of upper-division courses that change almost yearly as my interests and the interests of my students change. These include:
History of the English Language (taught every other year)
Global Medieval Literature (taught every other year)
Premodern Sexualities (taught every other year)
Medieval Risk and Future Studies
The Power of Music in Literature
Ways of Knowing in the Medieval World