Felisa Baynes-Ross

I am interested in the history of theological ideas and its overlap with literary experimentation in vernacular religious writing in medieval England. My book project, Beyond Church and Cloister: Lollardy and Dissenting Aesthetics in the Fourteenth Century, works across disciplinary boundaries in literature, theology, and rhetoric to consider how the -authors of religious treatises, sermons, and poetry enlist polemical modes to architecture new forms of faith for their readers. Lollards, the religious sect associated with John Wyclif, are well known for their side-stepping of institutional religion and their resistance to clerical authority. Although these positions feature explicitly in their writing, lollard polemic is morethan religious antagonism or ideologically motivated speech. Beyond Church and Cloister argues that the struggle to represent a lollard theology of “ghostly” living drives the writers’ making and unmaking of literary forms, bearing out the intimacies between text and life and proving polemic to be both a pragmatic and creative force in lollard spiritual programs. The texts I examine show how polemic affirms new subjectivities, communities, and desires even at the margins of religious orthodoxy. This study illumines the complexities of lollard textual culture and belief and offers new insights on how both lollard ideologies and aesthetics reform the works of contemporaneous writers such as the Pearl-poet.

My concern with religious non-conformity and discursive rupture grew out of a deep knowledge of histories of resistance in the Caribbean. In a recent article, I examine how Garifuna and Kalinago defense of their home in 18^th century St. Vincent elicits a sublime discourse that subverts Alexander Anderson’s (Scottish botanist) attempt to evade the ethics of Indigenous exile and genocide in his natural history. I am developing two related projects: one that explores Vincentian appropriation of Indigenous histories to mobilize grassroots movements and nation building and an essay on the yearly pilgrimage to Balliceux, St. Vincent— a site of collective trauma— and its function as a counter-hegemonic space for the descendants of exiles.

My teaching stretches across different histories, temporalities, and geographic spaces and challenges students to interrogate their assumptions about the past, consider the relationship between exigence and compositional mode, and experiment with writing in ways meaningful to them. To support student writers, I  have designed instructional materials such as these guides on expectations for scholarly writing. My courses have included topics on the sacred and the secular, heresy, writing and rebellion, home, and empire, subjects I also explore in my published poetry. 

Selected Publications

- “Remixing the College Essay: Antiracist and Multimodal Assignments for First-Year Writers” with Caitlin Cawley, Fordham University, Caroline Hagood, St. Francis College, and Mira Zaman, Borough of Manhattan Community College, Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture. vol., 25, no. 3.,2025.

- “The Garifuna Sublime: Indigenous Resistance and Landscape Aesthetics in Alexander Anderson’s Geography and History of St. Vincent, West Indies.” Caribbean Quarterly.vol.,70.2., 2024, pp. 179-202.

- “The Life of Love and Resistance to Clerical Authority in Book to a Mother and Middle English Lollard Writing.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, vol., 51, no. 2, 2021, pp. 215-240.

- “Ambages and Double Visages: Betrayal in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,” in Playing False: Representations of Betrayal. Cultural History and Literary Imagination, ed. Kristina Mendicino and Betiel Wasihun (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2013): 313-36.

Courses

The Sacred and the Secular (ENGL 1014); Rebels, Outcasts, and Heretics (ENGL 1014); Writing and Rebellion (ENGL 1014); Picturing Empire (ENGL 1014); Reading and Writing the Modern Essay (1020); The Teaching of English (ENGL 9090).

updated March 2026