Teaching and research interests: Early Scandinavian literature and culture. Old Icelandic language. Film history and theory (also through the Rhetoric Department). Emphasis in both medieval and film fields has been on social-historical topics (especially sex/gender and law) and narrative history and theory (especially issues of orality/literacy and genre).

Current projects: Present research includes work on legal process and narrative in both its film and its saga manifestations. Her book-in-progress, The People's Plot: Film, Narrative, and the Adversarial Imagination, will be published by Princeton University Press in 2005. She is also doing research into the legal origins of Icelandic saga narrative.

Selected publications

Books: (Click to purchase @ Amazon)

Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton Univ. Press and British Film Institute, 1992.

Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Critical Guide. Ed. with John Lindow. Cornell Univ. Press, 1985 -- Reprint University of Toronto Press, 2005.

The Medieval Saga. Cornell Univ. Press, 1982.

Articles:

"Dancin' in the Rain." Critical Inquiry 21 (1995).

"Regardless of Sex: Men, Women, and Power in Early Northern Europe." Speculum: Journal of the Medieval Academy of America, 68 (1993). Rpt. in Studying Medieval Women: Sex, Gender, Feminism. Medieval Academy of America, 1993; Rpt. in Representations 44 (1993).

"The Politics of Scarcity: On the Sex Ratio in Early Scandinavia." Scandinavian Studies 60 (1991). Rpt. in New Readings on Women in Old English Literature. Ed. Helen Damico and Alexandra Hennessey Olsen. Indiana Univ. Press.

"Hildigunnr's Lament: Women in Bloodfeud." Structure and Meaning. Ed. Gerd Wolfgang Weber, et al. Odense Univ. Press, 1987.

"The Long Prose Form." Arkiv för nordisk filologi 101 (1986).

"The Germanic Context of the Unferth Episode," Speculum 55 (1980).