Dr. Nicole Smith

UNT Faculty Profile

Department of English

Nicole Smith specializes in late medieval literature, with special interest in Chaucer, vernacular guides of pastoral care, and material culture. She has published the definitive scholarly edition of A Christian Mannes Bileeve, a fourteenth-century explanation of the Apostles' Creed with Middle English Texts (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2021). Her monograph, Sartorial Strategies: Outfitting Aristocrats and Fashioning Conduct in Late Medieval Literature (University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), examines the connection between dress, romance, and moral behavior in medieval vernacular texts and their figurations of fashionable aristocrats. In addition to preparing a critical edition of a Middle English guide to penance, The Clensyng of Mannes Sowle, she is presently thinking about Middle English lyric poems in preaching manuals. She has published essays in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Notes & Queries, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, and Medium Ævum. Her fellowships include an NEH Summer Stipend and an NEH Summer Seminar on the seven deadly sins in the Middle Ages. In 2015, she became University Distinguished Teaching Professor after having won UNT's President's Council Teaching Award and the J.H. Shelton Excellence in Teaching Award. She enjoys teaching classes on medieval women writers; gender, sexuality, and weaponry in medieval literature; and Geoffrey Chaucer's works. At UNT, Dr. Smith is inspired by enthusiastic students and intrigued by strange texts. Outside of UNT, she can be found either with her teenage children and their rescue pups, or racing her road bike on the amateur racing circuit.

Research interests: medieval, romance, pastoral care, women's studies