24 February 2025 (Dallas, TX) - Katherine Crassons, Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University, is the recipient of the 2025 Bonnie Wheeler Fellowship. One of the most prestigious grants for medievalists, the “Wheeler” aims to cultivate women as academic leaders.
Established to honor esteemed medievalist Bonnie Wheeler, the Fellowship Fund was directed at her request to support the research of tenured women medievalists “stuck” below the rank of full professor. In addition to a generous stipend, each recipient is paired with a distinguished mentor in the field who engages with the recipient and her project to its successful completion. The fellowship helps women who have been at the associate level for too long to get “unstuck” and move to full professor.
Professor Crassons will receive the $25,000 fellowship and the support of a mentor as she completes her research for her book, Signs of Wonder: Faith, Ethics, and Epistemology in Medieval and Early Modern England, in which she explores the contradictions and complexities inherent in concepts of miracles and belief in poetry, drama, and prose written before and after the Reformation. Signs of Wonder looks at how medieval people reacted to biblically-based miracle stories and to other representations of the supernatural in the religious environment of their day. In an era when texts routinely describe saints boiled in cauldrons of oil who feel no pain, visionary women who can predict the future, and eucharistic hosts that suddenly display Christ’s living body, this book asks a series of key questions: What did premodern people think about such incredible representations and events? What insights do texts reveal about their experience of faith in ideas and occurrences that often seem strange to us today? How did the faithful reckon with phenomena that perhaps tested the limits of believability even in their own era?
Chair of the Selection Committee, Professor Anne Yardley, Drew Theological School (retired) noted that the committee found the project compelling and expressed enthusiasm for Crassons’ application, “In Professor Crassons we see a hard-working and productive scholar with a great and doable project. We believe that a "Wheeler" will give her the support she needs to finish her book and attain the rank of full professor." Several members of the Selection Committee commented on Crassons’ steady record of publication and superlative teaching evaluations--to which she somehow ('miraculously,' we felt) adds yet another demanding responsibility, serving as the director of the university's press.
Hailing from New Orleans, Crassons earned a BA in English and Spanish from Louisiana State University, the MA from the University of Colorado-Boulder, and the PhD in English from Duke University before joining Lehigh University in 2004. She has been the Director of Lehigh University Press since 2014. Her research focuses on late medieval literature and culture with particular emphasis on religion. She has also written extensively on disability studies, often making connections between medieval and modern society and addressing such topics as poverty, Christian subjectivity, and neurodiversity.