Amanda Gerber’s research interests extend from ancient mythology to medieval science, and from Latin and Arabic to Middle English and other vernacular literatures. Her work especially explores the manuscripts that disseminated information across historical and cultural divides, shaping literary, political, pedagogical, and cartographic designs in the process. Her first book, Medieval Ovid: Frame Narrative and Political Allegory, examines the medieval analytical traditions that preserved and popularized Ovid’s Metamorphoses for late-medieval audiences. The book argues that medieval analysis uncovered a polyvocalic genre that appealed to an increasingly diverse educated class, who developed vernacular frame narratives in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Her second book, Mytho-Logics: The Medieval Creation of Modern Science Literacy (under review), investigates how medieval pedagogues used mythologies to cultivate scientific literacy so successfully that even laypeople could participate in knowledge production. The book suggests that this medieval curriculum still has lessons to teach us about how verbal arts wield the power to combat science illiteracy.

Her current work focuses on how medieval Latinate and Arabic cartographies, mythologies, and genealogies reshaped notions of Africa. She is currently completing two books: one, Shorting Africa, about Latin Christian and Arabic Muslim maps of Africa in the Middle Ages; the other, How the West Was Spun, about how medieval Latin and Arabic traditions retold ancient histories about Africa to create the idea of western civilization. She is also editing a volume of Anti-Colonial studies of Chaucer (with Candace Barrington) and a volume about reading lists as sources (with Martha Rust and Eva von Contzen). Her articles have appeared in New Medieval Literatures, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, and Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, among many others; and her work has been supported by the National Endowment of the Humanities and Mellon Foundation, among others.

Her teaching interests include global epics, popular romances, maps and travel literature, Chaucer, Bibles as Literature, and medieval women.

“All in the Family: Thomas Walsingham’s Medieval Genealogies of Greco-Roman
Mythologies,” South Atlantic Review 90.4 (2025): 102–20.
 
“Accumulating Easts: Ancient Geographies and Genealogies in John Gower’s
Confessio Amantis,” New Medieval Literatures 25 (2025): 169–99.
 
“Marginal Geography: Pedagogical Design in Medieval Commentaries on
Classical Poems.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 53.2 (2023): 225–60.
 
“Commentary Tradition.” In The Chaucer Encyclopedia, edited by Vincent Gillespie, Jessica Rosenfeld, and Katie Walter. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2023.
 
“Grounding the Gods: Spreading Geographical Euhemerism from Servius to
Boccaccio.” In Euhemerism and Its Uses: The Mortal Gods, edited by Syrithe Pugh, 104–26. New York: Routledge, 2021.
 
“Earthly Gower: Transforming Geographical Texts and Images in the Confessio
Amantis and Vox Clamantis Manuscripts.” In Gower in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books,
edited by Martha Driver, Derek Pearsall, and R. F. Yeager, 89–112. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK:
Boydell & Brewer, 2020.
 
“The Mythological Sciences of John Gower, Medieval Classicists, and Morgan MS M. 126.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 40 (2018): 257–88.
 
“Classical Pieces: Fragmenting Genres in Medieval England.” In Reading Poetry,
Writing Genre: English Poetry and Literary Criticism in Dialogue with Classical Scholarship,
edited by Silvio Friedrich Bär and Emily Hauser, 22–46. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.
 
Medieval Ovid: Frame Narrative and Political Allegory. New York: Palgrave, 2015.
“‘As olde bookes maken us memorie’: Chaucer and the Clerical Commentary Tradition.” Florilegium 29 (2012): 171–200.