PrairieLights: Book Matters Event: Kathy Lavezzo & William Rhodes in conv with Sarah Bond – Bad Medievalism & Work of Reform

Join them for a special University of Iowa Book Matters event! University of Iowa Professor Kathy Lavezzo will read from her new book, Bad Medievalism and the Modernity Problem, and Iowa Assistant Professor William Rhodes will read from his newest book, The Work of Reform: Literature and Political Ecology from Langland to Spenser. They will be joined in conversation with Associate Professor, Sarah E. Bond.

Kathy Lavezzo regularly teaches the English Department’s large introductory lecture course, Foundations of the English Major, with an eye toward the centrality of narrative to the human experience and the capacity of literary texts to move readers and solicit passionate attachment. She was trained as a medievalist and offers courses on medieval romance, Arthurian lore, the author known alternately as the Pearl-poet or the Gawain-poet, The Book of Margery Kempe (the first autobiography in English), and Geoffrey Chaucer’s masterpiece, the Canterbury Tales.  Of late, her research has moved into more contemporary eras, a shift that has inspired her to teach classes about authors including Paule Marshall, Stuart Hall, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Kazuo Ishiguro.

William Rhodes’ work focuses on the connections among medieval/Renaissance poetry, economics, and the environment. His book, The Work of Reform: Literature and Political Ecology from Langland to Spenser (Cornell 2025), considers how medieval poetry about agrarian work informed early colonial ideologies in the sixteenth century. His current research project is on apocalypticism, literary form, and economic crisis in late medieval and early modern literature. He teaches classes on medieval and early modern poetry and drama, as well as courses on critical theory and environmental literature.

Sarah E. Bond is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Iowa. She is interested in late Roman history, epigraphy, late antique law, Roman topography and GIS, Digital Humanities, and the socio-legal experience of ancient marginal peoples. She earned a PhD in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2011) and obtained a BA in Classics and History with a minor in Classical Archaeology from the University of Virginia (2005). Her book, Trade and Taboo: Disreputable Professionals in the Roman Mediterranean, was published with the University of Michigan Press in 2016.