The Bonnie Wheeler Fellowship Fund is pleased to announce that Mary Dzon, Associate Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has been awarded the 2026 Bonnie Wheeler Fellowship. The Fellowship, which supports the research of women medievalists below the rank of full professor, will enable Dzon to devote a full year to completing her current book project on divine emotion and affective piety in the later Middle Ages.

Dzon’s book project engages devotional texts, liturgical prayer, visionary writings, and visual culture to explore human perceptions of the divine. The project offers new perspectives on how medieval Christians imagined the emotional lives of God the Father and Christ the Judge. Her study traces the ways writers and artists attributed sorrow, love, and especially wrath to the divine, and how they grappled with the theological problem of an emotional God in a tradition that also affirmed divine impassibility. It examines depictions of God brandishing weapons at humanity, narratives in which Mary deflects the “arrows” of divine wrath, animal imagery with God as a predator and Christ’s wounded body as a place of refuge, and traditions of devotion to the Holy Face that juxtapose Christ’s pathos-inducing suffering with the terrifying gaze of the Judge at Doomsday. At the center of the book is a striking tension: medieval Christians were encouraged both to fear God’s punitive anger and to seek refuge in divine mercy, especially through the intercessory power of the Virgin Mary and Christ Child.

Bringing these materials together, Dzon argues that imaginative theology used the language of emotion—often gendered and sometimes troubling—to probe the mystery of a God who is at once a God of retribution and mercy.

Dzon is a noted scholar of later medieval literary culture, with particular expertise in Middle English and Latin religious texts. She received her PhD from the University of Toronto. She has published extensively on the Christ Child, Marian narratives, and the saints, and her broader interests include animal studies, women and gender, the history of emotions, the lifecycle, the body, manuscript studies, and translation. Her first monograph, The Quest for the Christ Child in the Later Middle Ages, won the 2021 Best First Book Award from the Southeastern Medieval Association. She has held fellowships at the Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts and the Huntington Library. She will conduct some of the Bonnie Wheeler Fellowship research at Clare Hall, Cambridge as a Visiting Fellow.

Named in honor of Bonnie Wheeler, a distinguished medievalist and award-winning teacher whose work has reshaped the field, the Fellowship Fund exists to support and mentor women scholars, who for various reasons both professional and private get “stuck” after tenure on the way to full professor. The Wheeler is designed to assist as they bring major research projects to completion.

In recognizing Mary Dzon’s project on divine emotionality and medieval affective piety, the selection committee affirms the significance of her contribution to our understanding of how premodern Christians imagined God, negotiated fear and intimacy, and used narrative and image to think about justice, mercy, and the emotions of the divine.