Samantha Zacher is a Professor of English at Cornell University. Her latest research has centered on the perception of Jews in the early middle ages, particularly in the context of Anglo-Saxon literature and culture. She has recently published a book on the subject, entitled Rewriting the Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon Verse: Becoming the Chosen People (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), and has completed an edited volume entitled Imagining the Jew in Anglo-Saxon Literature and Culture (forthcoming, University of Toronto Press). Out of this concern with ethnic otherness has grown her recent interrogation of the role of animal species in medieval literature and jurisdiction. The essay she will be presenting at the colloquium is part of her most recent work on medieval conceptions of otherness and expands the theoretical stakes of her previous work on exceptionalism in relation to Jewish others.