About

Kris Trujillo is an Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature, The Divinity School, and The College at The University of Chicago. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, an M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School, and a B.A. from Harvard University. Her research and teaching focus on medieval literature and hermeneutics, medieval theology, Christian mysticism, religion and literature, queer of color critique, psychoanalysis, critical theory, and film and popular culture. She is affiliated with several centers including the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, the Center for Latin American Studies, and Medieval Studies. Her scholarly work engages a variety of literary traditions—medieval Latin, Middle Dutch, English, Spanish, French, and German—and explores how medieval Christian devotional practices can expand contemporary understandings of desire, embodiment, and affect. She specializes in the dialogue between medieval Christian mysticism and contemporary queer theory, queering the medieval past and identifying medievalisms in queer literature, art, and theory. Her current book project, 'Jubilation of the Heart: How Monastic Song Became Mystical Poetics,' examines the emergence of vernacular mystical poetry from monastic devotional practices, emphasizing ritual, embodied, and communal aspects of mystical poetry. Her second book project, 'Ecstasy: The Queerness of Being beside Oneself,' explores the concept of ecstasy across philosophical, theological, sexual, and narcotic registers, connecting medieval mystical ecstasy with psychoanalytic and queer theory frameworks. A third project, 'Queer Melancholia: Grief in Theory,' considers queer mourning practices in relation to Freud’s 'Mourning and Melancholia' and the impact of the AIDS pandemic. Trujillo is actively involved in editing special issues and collaborating on projects related to medieval studies, queer theory, and religious practices. She is committed to anti-racist medieval studies and organizing events that promote queer premodernisms and queer of color critique. Before her current position, she was an Assistant Professor of English and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Fordham University. She advises students across disciplines in medieval studies, religion and literature, gender and sexuality studies, and queer of color critique, encouraging projects that cross historical periods and employ contemporary theoretical frameworks.

Research topics

• Psychology

Selected publications

• Critical Confessions Now

  2022

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Psychology

  Deploys a wide array of critical approaches and narrative voices to address different linguistic and cultural contexts in different periods.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Critical confessions now

  postmedieval a journal of medieval cultural studies · 2020-08-01 · 5 citations

  editorialOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• “That Abominable Solitary Vice We Call Theory”

  English Language Notes · 2018-04-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Organized around the complete works of John of the Cross, Juan Goytisolo’s Las virtudes del pájaro solitario (1988) presents a radical characterization of mysticism aligned with the spontaneity and immediacy of poetic genius. Through an elaboration of the opposition between critique and creation or theory and practice, Goytisolo aligns his version of mysticism with heresy and negative theology. But how might a return to John of the Cross’s writings wrest this “mystic” and “poet” from the confines of exceptionalism to rethink his exemplarity as grounded and cultivated in community? This article argues that reading John of the Cross’s Cántico espiritual in the context of the Carmelite reform not only destabilizes Goytisolo’s notion of radical mysticism but also makes imaginable a loving critique that offers the politics of queerness and religious difference an alternative to oppositionality per se.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Abdulhamit Arvas

  University of Pennsylvania

  1 shared

• Afrodesia McCannon

  1 shared

Labs

• RaceB4RacePI

Awards & honors

• 10th-anniversary special issue of postmedieval titled “Confe…
• special issue of Representations on “Practices of Devotion”…
• symposium on “Queer Premodernisms and Queer of Color Critiqu…
• 2023 RaceB4Race symposium on “Performance”