Christina Heckman, PhD

Associate Professor of English Augusta University

Augusta GA

Professor Heckman focuses on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, history of English language and Anglo-Saxon and middle English literature.

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Biography

Christina Heckman specializes in medieval English language and literature. She teaches courses in Anglo-Saxon and Middle English literature, Chaucer, early British literature, the history of the English language, linguistics, writing, humanities, and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. Her current research focuses on how the pedagogical practices of late antiquity influenced early medieval schools and the practice of disputation among teachers and students. She began her teaching career in Chicago, her hometown, and taught in New York and Ohio before coming to Augusta. She presents her research regularly at international conferences. Her work has appeared in Essays in Medieval Studies, The J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, JEGP, and Carmina Philosophiae: The Journal of the International Boethius Society.

Areas of Expertise

Anglo-Saxon and Middle English Literature

Works of J.R.R. Tolkien

History of English Language

Articles

Things in doubt: Inventio, dialectic, and Jewish secrets in Cynewulf's Elene

Journal of English and Germanic Philology

Christina M. Heckman

2009

Demonic Pedagogy and the Teaching Saint: Voice, Body, and Place in Cynewulf's Juliana

Medieval Feminist Forum

Christina Heckman

2019-10-01

In Cynewulf’s Old English poem Juliana, the saint frames her encounters with her adversaries as pedagogical confrontations, refusing the lessons they attempt to “teach” her and ultimately adopting the identity of a teacher herself. These confrontations depend on three key tropes in the poem: Juliana’s voice, as a material manifestation of language deployed by the saint; her body, both as living body and as relic; and place, especially the place of the saint’s martyrdom and/or burial. Viewed through theories of material feminism, these tropes reveal diverse forms of agency in the poem, as both human and non-human agents make bodies and places newly intelligible as dynamic and interlinking phenomena