Associate Chair of Romance Studies,
Associate Professor of Romance Studies
Research and Teaching
Irit Kleiman teaches courses on the literatures and cultures of medieval and Renaissance France in a global context, and serves on the faculty of the BU Core Curriculum in the Humanities.
Her interdisciplinary research asks questions about the writing of history; the cultural production of memory; dialogues between literature and the Law; affect; material culture; and sensory encounters, especially tactile. Much of her critical writing is informed by an ongoing engagement with the intellectual legacies of psychoanalysis.
Kleiman’s most recent book, The Hell of Holy War: Reading Joinville’s Crusade Memoir is forthcoming with Cornell University Press (2026).
Her first book, Philippe de Commynes: Memory, Betrayal, Text (University of Toronto Press, 2013), received the Newberry Library’s Weiss/Brown Award. She is the editor of Voice and Voicelessness in Medieval Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
Kleiman is also the convener of the February 2026 conference-workshop “Architectures of the Apocalypse,” hosted at Boston University.