Hello.

I’m a medievalist who works on animals and posthumanism. I’m a professor of English literature at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. My books are How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages (Ohio State University Press, 2011), which the press has made freely available for download here; and the follow-up, How Not to Make a Human: Pets, Feral Children, Worms, Sky Burial, Oysters (University of Minnesota Press, 2019).

My current book project, The Irrational Animal, pushes at the limits and problems of the concept of “reason” in the Middle Ages. My chapters will be on: 1) The limits of nonhuman animal reason; 2) Whether the rational soul thinks? (aka, the lower limits of the rational soul); 3) Reason and free choice in Boethius; 4) Marguerite Porete and the Problem of Suprarational Freedom. Links are to drafts. There’s also one one on animals and emotion. Complete draft by end of June 2026.

I have also published on medieval vegetarianism, the white supremacist fascination with Vikings, and Shakespeare’s animals, among other related topics. I’ve published most recently on wolf-hunting and the utility of knights in Piers Plowman for the Yearbook of Langland Studies, and a thing on reason in Boethius in the journal Medieval Encounters, but I have at present an absurd amount of stuff in production (on Middle English sporting manuals, on trees, on animals and disability, an interview with a vegan chef for an anthology on punk rock and animals, an old piece on forests, something on medieval apocalypses, and two essays on animals and emotion: honestly it’s a short book’s worth of stuff). For a sample of my scholarship, see here. For a sense of my teaching, see the 63 videos (and counting) of short lectures I’ve made chiefly for my undergraduates.

My CV. I’m on Bluesky ; Twitter’s a cesspit. Delete it. You can contact me via ksteel at brooklyn dot cuny dot edu