Susan Signe Morrison

Born April 15, 1959 in Morristown, New Jersey, Susan Signe Morrison received her B.A. from Swarthmore College in 1981 and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Brown University in 1991. In 1993 she married Jim Kilfoyle; they have a daughter and a son. She is Professor of English at Texas State University – San Marcos.

Susan has published numerous articles on varying topics – from political cartoons created in the wake of the fall of the wall in East Germany to gender readings of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. Her book, Women Pilgrims in Late Medieval England, was the first study to focus on women pilgrims as a separate category of pilgrims worthy of historical, literary and theoretical consideration. She has also written “Women and Pilgrimage” in Pilgrimage. A CD-Rom Teaching and Learning Resource. CD-Rom (From Christianity & Culture at St John's College, Nottingham and the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York, 2006; http://www.york.ac.uk/projects/christianityandculture/pilgrimage.html). Her book about waste and filth in the Middle Ages is entitled Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer's Fecopoetics; http://www.palgrave-usa.com/catalog/product.aspx?isbn=1403984883. She is currently working on a book about Waste Studies and literary theory as well as on about fourteenth-century pilgrimage poetics.

A published poet (including “Beowulf’s Women” in WOMB: A New Online Journal of Women’s Poetry, January 2007, http://www.wombpoetry.com/morrison.html), Susan has also published travel writing on the Norfolk Broads ("A Church Tour by Slow Boat," The New York Times Sunday Travel Section, July 23, 1995, 12, 32). She is working on a comic memoir about her family’s year living in London and a children’s book inspired by that year.