Jessica Hines

Jessica Hines is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Southern Maine. She teaches a range of courses, including Chaucer, Medieval Sex Ed, Witch Lit, and The Sea in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. Her areas of interest include the intersection of sexuality, religion, and race in late medieval and early modern literature, as well as medieval and classical theories of ethics, the emotions, and ecology. Her book, Forms of Suffering: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Chaucerian Pity (Cornell University Press, 2026), argues that Chaucer made pity a central ethical and aesthetic concern in English literature. Her scholarship has appeared in Exemplaria (2022), Religion & Literature (2022), and Believing Ancient Women (2023), and her public writing in The Conversation and Ploughshares. She is currently at work on a second monograph, When Eve Delved: Gender, Nature, and Labor in the 15th Century, and on Ethical Consumption Before Capitalism, a digital humanities project in partnership with Astrid Giugni (Duke University) and Duke University’s Rhodes Information Initiative. Essays from these projects are forthcoming in Studies in the Age of Chaucer and Studies in Philology.