Rate My Professor Barbara Zimbalist

Dr. Barbara Zimbalist is Chair of the Department of Literatures and Cultural Studies at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. In this role, she oversees programs including Literature and Cultural Studies, Gender and Women's Studies, and Mexican American Studies. Previously, she served as Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso, where she was Director of the Literature Program, Graduate Advisor for English and American Literature, and Provost’s Faculty Development Fellow for 2023–24. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis in 2013.

Zimbalist is a medievalist specializing in vernacular religious literatures from medieval England, France, and the Low Countries, with emphases on women’s religious writing, Middle English devotional literature, medieval Flemish mysticism, Anglo-Norman hagiography, manuscript studies, book history, and the intersection of critical theory and medieval studies. Her accolades include a Fulbright Scholarship, a fellowship from the Belgian American Educational Foundation supporting research at the University of Antwerp’s Ruusbroec Institute and the University of Liège, and a WSRP Research Associate position at Harvard Divinity School in 2018–19. She received the Department of English Excellence in Teaching Award at UTEP in 2018. Key publications feature her monograph Translating Christ in the Middle Ages: Gender, Authorship, and the Visionary Text in England, France, and the Low Countries (University of Notre Dame Press, 2022) and co-edited collection Writing Holiness with Jessica Barr (Brepols, 2023). She has authored articles and book chapters on devotional literature and hagiography. Zimbalist is co-editor of the Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures and associate editor of the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Women’s Writing in the Global Middle Ages. Her scholarship illuminates gender dynamics, authorship, and visionary texts in medieval religious cultures, influencing studies in hagiography and affective piety. She has taught courses on Chaucer, critical theory, and early British literature and advised the Alpha Iota Beta chapter of Sigma Tau Delta.