Biography
B.A. Sarah Lawrence College; Ph.D. University of California, Irvine (2002); LMS, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (2005). Patricia Dailey joined Columbia faculty in 2004 after holding a Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellowship at Northwestern University (2002-2004). She specializes in medieval literature and critical theory. Her first book Promised Bodies: Time, Language, and Corporeality in Medieval Women's Mystical Texts (Columbia University Press, 2013) examined the relation between gender, temporality, the body, and language in medieval mystical texts, with a focus on the thirteenth century mystic Hadewijch. Her current book projects include a book on the arboreal sublime and a book, In Parentheses, on the poetics of lived experience. She is the co-editor, with Veerle Fraeters, of A Companion to Hadewijch (forthcoming, Brill) and with Jay Gao, of Thinking Treely, a volume based on her seminars and RBML exhibit on Trees. Her work on trees has been awarded a Climate Humanities Grant, a Just Humanities Grant, a fellowship at the Institute of Ideas and Imagination, and a Heyman Center fellowship.
Articles include, “The Elemental Sublime” forthcoming (2026) in the Oxford Handbook of the Sublime, “Planting Sublimity” in Medieval Ecocriticisms (2025), “Inventing Experience: Medieval, Psychedelic, Postmodern” in SAQ (2025), an interview with Lyotard in Jean-François Lyotard: The Later Interviews and Debates 1983-1997, ed. Kiff Bamford (2025) and a co-authored piece with the architect Sandro Marpillero "Cieli in uni Stanza/Skies in a Room" in Vesper 7 (2022).
Other articles include "Riddles, Wonder, and Responsiveness in Anglo-Saxon Literature," in the Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature 500-1150 (2012); "The Body and its Senses" and "Time and Memory" in the Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism (2012); "Children of Promise: The Bodies of Hadewijch of Antwerp," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (Spring, 2011); and "Questions of Dwelling in Anglo-Saxon Poetry and Medieval Mysticism: Inhabiting Landscape, Body, Mind," New Medieval Literatures (vol 8, 2006). Other articles have appeared in the Syndicate Network (2022), Women's Studies Quarterly, Witness Issue (2007), Le Secret: Motif et Moteur de la Litterature (1999), Les Imaginaires du Mal (2000), the PMLA's special issue on Derrida (2005), and Routledge's Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopedia. She has translated works by Giorgio Agamben (The Time That Remains, Stanford 2005), Jean-François Lyotard, and Antonio Negri. She is the founder of the Colloquium for Early Medieval Studies (formerly the Anglo-Saxon Studies Colloquium) and co-founder of the Affect Studies University Seminar. She has served as the Director of the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender and is the Co-Chair of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Council (WGSSC). She was the initiator and co-founder of the Junior Faculty Advisory Board (JFAB), and recently served as Chair (2023-2025). She serves on the board of trustees of the non-profits Yiya Solutions and the New York Medieval Society.
