Rate My Professor Jenny Adams

Jenny Adams is Professor of Medieval Literature and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She holds a Ph.D. and an A.M. in English Literature from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in English Literature and French Language and Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles. In her leadership roles, Adams directs the UMass Oxford Summer Seminar, co-directs the Five-College Medieval Studies Seminar, and co-chairs the Local Organizing Committee for the Medieval Academy of America Annual Meeting in 2026 hosted by UMass Amherst and Amherst College. She was selected as the 2024-2025 UMass ADVANCE Faculty Fellow, supporting equity and inclusion efforts across the university.

Adams's research centers on late medieval English literature, academic debt and university life in late medieval England, the history of the book, and chess as a metaphor for political organization in the late Middle Ages. She has received fellowships from the Bodleian Library, American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, Newberry Library, and Mellon Foundation. Her books include Power Play: The Literature and Politics of Chess in the Late Middle Ages (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), editor of William Caxton’s The Game and Playe of the Chesse (Medieval Institute Publications, 2009), and co-editor of Medieval Women and Their Objects (University of Michigan Press, 2017). Her monograph Degrees of Collateral: Books, Borrowing, and the Business of Medieval Oxford is under contract with Pennsylvania State University Press. Select articles are “Academic Loans and Scholarly Networks in Late Medieval Oxford” (Journal of the Early Book Society, 2024), “Thomas Hunt’s Monograms” (The Library, 2021), “On Chaucer’s Clerk, His Books, and the Value of Education” (Palgrave, 2021), and pieces in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, and The Chaucer Review. Adams has contributed public scholarship to The Conversation on medieval student loans, textbook costs, and chess symbolism. She teaches courses on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Arthurian legends, medieval dream poetry, travel narratives, and Old English. Her scholarship illuminates material culture, allegorical representation, and the origins of higher education practices.