Hannah Johnson

Affiliations

Humanities Engage, Jewish Studies, Provost Academy

About Hannah

Hannah Johnson is Professor of English and Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Recruitment in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh, and affiliated with the Collaboratory Against Hate and the programs in Medieval and Renaissance Studies and Jewish Studies. Her research focuses on the history of antisemitism, exclusionary rhetoric, Jewish-Christian relations, intellectual history, religious literature, and the history of gender. She is also a strong advocate of Pitt’s Study Abroad programs, having taught students in London, York, and Sydney. Her teaching regularly includes courses on conspiracy theories, witchcraft accusations, and the fairy tradition, among other topics.

Johnson is currently working on a forthcoming academic trade book, The Dawn of Magical Thinking: Why Premodern Ideas of Witch-Hunting, Antisemitism, and Islamophobia Continue to Harm Our World. Initial work was for this project was undertaken with Simone Marshall of the University of Otago under the aegis of a Fulbright Fellowship in New Zealand (2023), and was also supported by a distinguished short-term fellowship from the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. This project examines the medieval and early modern roots of persecutory rhetoric. The book brings together insights from history, narratology, and social psychology to show how antisemitic and anti-Muslim discourse and misogynist narratives of witch-hunting shaped collective fears in the past—and how such patterns echo in the present. Written for both scholars and general readers, it offers tools for identifying and deconstructing exclusionary narratives today.

Her second book, The Critics and the Prioress: Antisemitism, Criticism, and Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale (with Heather Blurton; University of Michigan Press, 2017), re-examines the critical history of Chaucer’s most controversial tale. The study shows how scholarship on The Prioress’s Tale has been shaped by the difficulties critics face in confronting its antisemitic legend, and it proposes new directions for research through intellectual history, source studies, aesthetics, and gender studies.

Johnson’s first monograph, Blood Libel: The Ritual Murder Accusation at the Limit of Jewish History (Michigan, 2012), investigates the twelfth-century origins of the ritual murder accusation in the story of William of Norwich. The book explores how juridical frameworks of guilt, innocence, crime, and libel have shaped both the medieval record and subsequent scholarship on the blood libel myth.

Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Hewlett Foundation, the Beinecke Foundation, and others. She also co-edited, with Nina Caputo, a special issue of postmedieval, “The Holocaust and the Middle Ages.”

Representative Publications 

“‘The Childe of Bristowe,’ ‘The Prioress’s Tale,’ and the Possibility of Neighbor Love,” forthcoming in special issue, “Neighbors and Neighboring,” Exemplaria 2021.

“Jews as Others and Neighbors: Encountering the Prioress’s Tale in the Classroom,” with Heather Blurton, in Jews in Medieval England: Teaching Representations of the ‘Other’, eds. Miriamne Krummel and Tison Pugh (New York: Palgrave, 2017): 87-100.

Review of David Nirenberg, Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam in the Middle Ages and Today, in Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 11:1 (2017): 1-3.

“Stories People Tell: On the Blood Libel.” Special issue of Law & Literature 28:1 (2016): 11-26.

“Reading the Prioress's Tale in the Fifteenth Century: Lydgate, Hoccleve, and Marian Devotion," with Heather Blurton, The Chaucer Review 50:1-2 (2015): 136-59.

“The Purposes of Historicism: Antisemitism and Art in Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale.” Middle English Literature: Criticism and Debate, Routledge. Eds. D. Vance Smith And Holly Crocker. Routledge, 2014.

“Virtual Jews and Figural Criticism: Some Recent Scholarship on the Idea of the Jew in Western Culture,” with Heather Blurton, Special issue of Philological Quarterly. 92:1 (2013): 115-30.

Research Interests 

Anglophone, Francophone, and Latinate literature of the high and later Middle Ages; history of anti-Jewish and Islamophobic rhetoric; history of antisemitism; Jewish Studies; comparative religious studies; saints’ lives; early modern print culture; history of witchcraft and magic; historiography in theory and practice; Western intellectual history; folklore