Dr. Pareles (they+) is a medievalist whose interests include Old and Middle English literature, translation, temporalities, critical animal studies, and Jewish-Christian relations.

Their first book, Nothing Pure: Jewish Law, Christian Supersession, and Bible Translation in Old English (University of Toronto Press, 2024) explores how the cultural translation of Jewish law promoted pre-Conquest Christian projects such as the promotion of priestly chastity and ecclesiastial sovereignty over the secular.

Their second book project, tentatively titled Time’s Others: Infant, Animal, and Jewish Temporalities in Medieval Christianity, explores the abjected, arrested, and pregnant temporalities that make medieval Christian futures possible.

Selected Recent Publications

Nothing Pure: Jewish Law, Christian Supersession, and Bible Translation in Old English. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2024.

“Already/Never: Jewish-Porcine Conversion in the Middle English Children of the Oven Miracle.” Philological Quarterly 98.3 (2019): 221-42.

“What the Raven Said to the Eagle: Animal Language and the Return of Loss in Beowulf.” In Dating Beowulf: Studies in Intimacy. Edited by Daniel C. Remein and Erica Weaver. Manchester University Press, 2019. 164-86.

“Jewish Heterosexuality, Queer Celibacy? Ælfric Translates the Old Testament Priesthood.” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 8 (2017): 292–306.

“Men as Meat: Exploiting Jewish Law in Ælfric’s Translation of Maccabees.” Exemplaria 27 (2015): 187-204.

“Giving Yiddish the Devil: How Missionary Translation Reckons with Demons in the Yiddish New Testament.” Literature and Theology 26 (2012): 144-59.