Amy Amendt-Raduege, PhD
she/her/hers, Instructor
Office
Location
HU 277
Hours
In person, 10:00am-12:30pm MWF, and by appointment
About
Pronunciation: Amy: AYE-me, Amendt: ah-MEN-t, Raduege: Rhymes with "league"
Amy Amendt-Raduege specializes in literature of the medieval Global North, concentrating on about 500-1100 CE. She is especially interested in the lives, literature, and belief systems of everyday people, particularly surrounding death, dying, and burial. In other words, she reads a lot of medieval ghost stories. She is also a Tolkien scholar and has written and spoken on Tolkien's works in the US and Europe. Her first book, "The Sweet and the Bitter": Death and Dying in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, won the prize for International Inklings Scholarship.
Currently, she is working on a book exploring the development of the afterlife in Tolkien's legendarium, as well as a non-Tolkien-related book on the transition of ghosts from the very corporeal revenants found in medieval Norse and English literature to the incorporeal conceptions of ghosts we hold today.
Research Interests
- Medieval Literature and Culture
- Folklore
- Archaeology
- Eschatology
- Medieval History
- Tolkien Studies
- Ghostlore
- Old English
- Old Norse