Kortney Stern

Visiting Lecturer at Indiana University, Bloomington
Indiana University

Biographical Sketch: Kortney Stern is a proud first-generation college student, pursuing a Ph.D. in English Literature at Indiana University. Her academic career began at Diablo Valley Community College and has taken her to San Francisco State University (B.A. in English Literature) and Mills College (M.A. in English Literature). Currently, Kortney is working on a dissertation on sound and silence in which she argues that many characters found across late medieval texts have been deemed "silent" or "marginal" too quickly. By reading texts with our literary eyes and ears, Kortney argues that we can learn to hear the ways in which queer and female characters do, in fact, vocalize through "sonic expressions" of their own design, proving that even those on the supposed margins can make sonic utterances that carry and combat traditional and often exclusionary modes of linguistic meaning making and communication.