Biography

Kathryn L. Lynch is the Katharine Lee Bates and Sophie Chantal Hart Professor of English at Wellesley College. From 2010-2017, she served as Dean of Faculty Affairs, with a broad portfolio of departments in the arts and humanities, and from 2018-2020, she was Director of the Wellesley College Freedom Project. She received her B.A. from Stanford University (majoring in English and Classics) and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in English Language and Literature. Her scholarly specialty is medieval English literature, especially the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer. She is the author of two books (The High Medieval Dream Vision: Poetry, Philosophy, and Literary Form [Stanford, 1988] and Chaucer's Philosophical Visions [D.S. Brewer, 2000]), and is the editor of two others (Chaucer's Cultural Geography [Routledge, 2002] and Dream Visions and Other Poems [a Norton Critical Edition, 2007]. Her edition of the dream-visions is the standard version now used by The Norton Chaucer (2019). She has also written numerous articles and book reviews on medieval topics, which have appeared in journals like Speculum, The Chaucer Review, and Studies in the Age of Chaucer, as well as opinion pieces on issues of importance in higher education for publications such as The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. She is currently writing about the representation of food in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and experimenting with some new modes of writing. She lives in Wellesley, MA, with her husband, Robert McDonnell (a lawyer). She has three adult children (Michael, Madeline, and Leo McDonnell) who live respectively in New York, Oregon, and Massachusetts, and are pursuing careers in law, fiction-writing, and music/technology.