Susan Signe Morrison

Books

The recently discovered World War II poetry by Joan Wehlen Morrison (edited by her daughter, Susan Signe Morrison), author of Home Front Girl, tells a unique – and true -- story as this teenager loses her innocence due to the impending war and its violent arrival.

Gold Medal Winner in the category of Wisdom Poetry [2021 Human Relations Indie Book Awards]
Finalist: 2021 Eric Hoffer Book Award

GRENDEL'S MOTHER: THE SAGA OF THE WYRD-WIFE

GRENDEL'S MOTHER: THE SAGA OF THE WYRD-WIFE tells the story of Beowulf from the point of view of the women.

Winner: Words on Wings Book Award for young adult fiction
Finalist for the 2016 Wishing Shelf Book Award in the category of Adult Fiction
Finalist for the 2014-2015 Sarton Literary Award for Historical Fiction
Finalist for Foreward Reviews' 2015 Indiefab Book of the Year Award: Historical (Adult Fiction)

HOME FRONT GIRL: A DIARY OF LOVE, LITERATURE, AND GROWING UP IN WARTIME AMERICA

The actual diaries of a teenage girl living in Chicago just before World War II and as the war begins.

Named by the Children's Book Committee of the Bank Street College of Education to the Best Children's Book of the Year 2013 list (Memoir: Ages 14 & up).
Gold Medal in Historical Young Adult
Words on Wings Book Award

A MEDIEVAL WOMAN'S COMPANION: WOMEN'S LIVES IN THE EUROPEAN MIDDLE AGES

This book, filled with images, tells the stories of the virtuous virgins, marvelous maidens, and fierce feminists of the Middle Ages who trail-blazed paths for women today. Ideal for high school and college classroom use in courses ranging from history and literature to women's and gender studies.

Gold Medal Winner in College Nonfiction by Literary Classics;
Bronze Medal Winner for the 2016 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in Women's Studies;
Honorable Mention in Adult Nonfiction and Young Adult Nonfiction.

THE LITERATURE OF WASTE: MATERIAL ECOPOETICS AND ETHICAL MATTER

New Materialist approach to comparative literature focusing on waste--garbage, trash, and detritus--and its metaphorical and ethical impact.

EXCREMENT IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES: SACRED FILTH AND CHAUCER'S FECOPOETICS

Why does excrement appear so frequently in medieval literature, especially the works by Geoffrey Chaucer? Do you dare to find out?

WOMEN PILGRIMS IN LATE MEDIEVAL ENGLAND: PRIVATE PIETY AS PUBLIC PERFORMANCE

The first book to ever focus on medieval women pilgrims--in history, in literature, and in art.

Essays

This reader is featured in The Berlin Review.

If you would like a pdf of an article or essay, please contact me.

Fiction (short pieces)

"The Stylite." Feminist Spaces 4.1. Spring/Summer 2021: pp. 64-66.
"The Page Turner." Revenge. Ed. Satya Ram. Pondicherry, India: Free Spirit, 2022.

Creative Nonfiction [essays]

"Schwanenwerder, a Hidden Gem of Berlin: Tracing a Nazi Past," The Berlin Review (August 2025).
"The Landlady." The Vincent Brothers Review. Volume 26 "Housekeeping." June 7, 2024.
"Behind the Iron Canon: Teaching Literary Theory in East Germany." The Font: A Literary Journal for Language Teachers. April 2023.
"Throbbing with Life." The Ekphrastic Review. April 24, 2021.
"What it was like voting as an American in Germany right before the Berlin Wall fell." The Local.de, Germany's News in English. October 29, 2020. h
"FaceTimes." Tejascovido. April 6, 2020.
"Teaching in East Germany in the 1980s: Collaborating with my Stasi File." FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts 29 (Autumn 2019; 13/12/2019): 1-19.
"Writing a Diary – on Paper." This I Believe. October 21, 2011.

Poetry [edited chapbook; individual poems]

Another Troy, edited chapbook of poems by Joan Wehlen Morrison. Georgetown, KY: Finishing Line Press, 2020. Edited by Susan Morrison.
"Resurrection Fern," ISLE [Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment] 29:4 (2022): 1333.
"The Song of the Lark." The Ekphrastic Review. August 9, 2021.
"Cathedral." Taj Mahal Review 20.2 (2020): 91.
"The Third Plague." Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry (2019): 96.
"Table Manners." Mothering Magazine 109 (Nov./Dec. 2001): 62.

INTERVIEWS

"Wasting and Being Wasted: Self, Animals, Society" with Dr. Asijit Datta, The Heritage College, Kolkata, India. October 28 2021.
Interviewed by Cold War Conversations (2020): "An American Teaching English in East Germany."
"What Did People Use Before Toilet Paper Was Invented?" in Life's Little Mysteries, series for Live Science. (Sept 20, 2020).
Interviewed for "In Deep," Podcast from The Water Main (American Public Media). "Dirty Water."
Interviewed by History Channel for "All the Ways We've Wiped: The History of Toilet Paper and What Came Before." April 15, 2020.
Interview Subject in Henry Alford, "What Would Freud Make of the Toilet Paper Panic?" The New Yorker. March 23, 2020.
Interview Subject in Zak Jason, "On Pooping in the Dark—No Lights, No Phones, No Distractions." WIRED. May 28, 2019.
Slate.fr. Grégoire Fleurot. "Depuis quand lance-t-on des excréments en signe de protestation?" 7.25.2013.
Interview-Anfrage Funkhaus Europa (Radio Bremen), Theme: Disgust and Shame: Excrement. May 9, 2006. In German Language.
Deutschlandfunk: "Studiozeit: Aus Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften." Theme: Taboo. May 11, 2006. In German Language.

SCHOLARLY ARTICLES and CHAPTERS in BOOKS [Selected]

"An Uncanny Pilgrimage through the Wastescapes of W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn and Cormac McCarthy's The Road: Synchronic Time and Revenant Metaphorical Thinking," Special Issue on Post-Apocalyptic Waste, Revenant 10 (2024): 143-161.
"Body" and "Cecily Chaumpaigne." The Chaucer Encyclopedia, edited by Richard Newhauser, Vincent Gillespie, Jessica Rosenfeld, and Katie L. Walter. Volume I. Wiley Blackwell, 2023: 224-227; 394-6.
"Story into Theory, Theory into Story: A Conversation on Braided Scholarship" with Catriona Sandilands for Climate Changes Global Perspectives (Series: Challenges of Modernity) edited by Lena Pfeifer, Molina Klingler, and Hannah Nelson-Teutsch. Würzburg, Germany: Würzburg University Press, 2022: 17-30.
"Smuggled Balsam and the Inscription of Memory: Hugeberc von Hildesheim and the Pilgrimage of Saint Willibald." In Women's Lives: Self-Representation, Reception and Appropriation in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of Elizabeth Petroff, edited by Nahir I. Otaño Gracia and Daniel Armenti. University of Wales Press, 2022, pp. 141-156.
"Consent and Lemman in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Reeve's Tale." Notes & Queries (1): 45-49.
"Insistent, Persistent, Resilient: The Negative Poetics of Patient Griselda." Medieval Feminist Forum, vol. 56 no. 2 (2020): 73–92.
"Slow Practice as Ethical Aesthetics: The Ecocritical Strategy of Patience in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Clerk's Tale." Special Issue: 2020 Ecocriticism: In Europe and Beyond; 10th Year Anniversary Issue. Ecozon@ 11.2 (2020): 118-127. DOI:
"[A]n exterior air of pilgrimage": The Resilience of Pilgrimage Ecopoetics and Slow Travel from Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales to Jack Kerouac's On the Road." Featured Article in Special Issue of Humanities (2020) 9, 117: 1-11. Special Issue: Keep on Rolling Under the Stars: Green Readings on the Beat Generation.
"The Body: Unstable, Gendered, Theorized." In A Cultural History of Comedy in the Middle Ages edited by Martha Bayless. Volume 2 of A Cultural History of Comedy. London: Bloomsbury, 2020: 99-119.
"Marie de France's Saint Patrick's Purgatory as Dynamic Diptych." Le Cygne: Journal of the International Marie de France Society, Third Series, Volume 6 (2019): 49-65.
"Slow Pilgrimage Ecopoetics." Special issue on Randomness and Design. Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 10.1 (2019): 40-59.
"Waste in Literature and Culture: Aesthetics, Form, and Ethics." In EuropeNow: a journal of research & art 27. May 7, 2019.
"Dynamic Dirt: Medieval Holy Dust, Ritual Erosion, and Pilgrimage Ecopoetics." Open Library of Humanities [Waste: Papers on Disposability, Decay and Depletion]. 5.1 (2019): pp. 1-30.
"Walking as Memorial Ritual: Pilgrimage to the Past." Featured Article for M/C Journal: A Journal of Media and Culture 21.4 (2018). Special Issue: Walking.
"Grendel's Mother in Fascist Italy: Beowulf in a Catholic Youth Publication." International Journal of Comic Art (IJOCA) 20.1 (2018): 331-348.
"Walking the Walk: Experiential Learning, Pilgrimage, and 'Kynde Knowynge'" in The Once and Future Classroom: Teaching the Middle Ages. Spring 2016.
"Waste Aesthetics: Form as Restitution." Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 20.3(2013):1-15.
"Postmedieval fecopoet[h]ics." postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2010) 1, 150-156.
"Waste Space: Pilgrim Badges, Ophelia, and Walsingham Remembered." Walsingham in Literature and Culture from the Middle Ages to Modernity: Landscape, Sexuality, and Cultural Memory. Eds. Gary Waller and Dominic Janes. London: Ashgate, 2010: 49-66.
"Scholarship on Literary Pilgrimage" and "Theory and Pilgrimage." The Brill Encyclopedia of Pilgrimage. Gen. Ed. Larissa Taylor. 2009: 670-1; 752-4.
"Disabling the Medieval: The Excremental Middle Ages." In Rubbish, Waste and Litter: Culture and Its Refuse/als. Ed. Tadeusz Rachwal. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo SWPS Academica, 2008: 113-121.
"Unnatural Authority: The Heroic Tradition and The Wife's Lament." Medievalia et Humanistica 27 (2000): 19-31.
"The Use of Biography in Medieval Literary Criticism: The Case of Geoffrey Chaucer and Cecily Chaumpaigne." The Chaucer Review 34 (1999): 69-86.
"Introduction: Medieval Children's Literature." Children's Literature Association Quarterly 23 (1998): 2-6. Special Issue Spring 1998: Medieval Children's Literature.
"Don't Ask, Don't Tell: The Wife of Bath and Vernacular Translations." Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 8.1 (1996): 97-123.
"A Church Tour by Slow Boat." The New York Times Sunday Travel Section. July 23, 1995, 12, 32.
"Women Writers and Women Rulers: Rhetorical and Political Empowerment in the Fifteenth-Century." Women In German Yearbook 9 (1994): 25-48.
"The Feminization of the German Democratic Republic in Political Cartoons 1989-1990." Journal of Popular Culture 25 (1992): 35-51.
"A Feminist Reader-Response to Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival: The Position of the Female Reader." Lesarten: New Methodologies and Old Texts. Otto Keller and Alexander Schwarz, eds.. Part of the TAUSCH (Text Analysis in the University) series. Bern: Peter Lang, 1990: 125-140.
"An Introduction to Feminist Literary Theory" with Dr. Christel Wagener. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 38 (1990): 315-330.
"Loss of Virginity: Cinematic Spectacle of Genre and Gender in an American Romance." Rostocker Forschungen zur Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft 6, 1989: 52-53.
"Displaced Rivalry in Hartmann von Aue's Iwein." Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 25 (1986): 45-62.

ADDITIONAL ACTIVITY

Featured in museum exhibit at University of Rostock, Germany: "Geknebelter Geist: Politische Überwachung und Verfolgung an der Rostocker Universität 1945 bis 1989/90" [""Gagged Mind. Political Surveillance and Persecution at the University of Rostock 1945-1989/90"]. Section: "Unter Kontrolle: Auslandsbeziehungen" ["Under Control: Foreign Relationships"].