Eileen A. Joy


Eileen A. Joy is an American literary critic who is a specialist in Old English literary studies and cultural studies and is the publisher and founding director of Punctum Books: spontaneous acts of scholarly combustion.
She holds a B.A. in English from Virginia Commonwealth University, an M.F.A. in Fiction from Virginia Commonwealth University and a Ph.D. in Medieval Literature and Intellectual History from University of Tennessee with a dissertation Beowulf and the Floating Wreck of History. She is the founder of the BABEL Working Group and is co-editor of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies.

Research interests

Joy's research interests also span poetry and poetics, intellectual history, ethics, affects, embodiment, queer studies, object/thing studies, the ecological, post-humanisms, and open access scholarly communications.

Academic positions

Publications