Alison L. Beringer (NHC Fellow, 2025–26)

Alison L. Beringer is an associate professor of classics and humanities at Montclair State University. Trained as a German medievalist (PhD, Princeton University), and with an undergraduate degree in classics and comparative literature, Beringer pursues research in the Nachleben of antiquity in medieval and early modern Germany. She is particularly interested in the interactions between the visual and the verbal—ranging from relationships between illuminations and texts in medieval manuscripts to literary narratives about visual artifacts, both aspects that underlie her book The Sight of Semiramis: Late Medieval and Early Modern Narratives of the Babylonian Queen (Arizona Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2016). 

Teaching in a classics and humanities department allows Beringer to pursue her broader interests, including classical mythology and sports, a combination that led to her selection as a university Community Engaged Teaching Fellow (2022–2024). Beringer also regularly teaches about issues of gender and representation in medieval culture, and was coeditor of the collection Gender Bonds, Gender Binds: Men, Women, and Family in Middle High German Literature (2021). In addition to her research and teaching, Beringer has served since 2019 on the Advisory Board of the Journal of English and Germanic Philology and has been an editor at The Medieval Review since 2020. 

Selected Publications

• Beringer, Alison L. “Writing to Mothers: A Humanist’s Justification of Sculpture.” Euphorion: Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte 117, no. 3 (2023): 351–72.
• Beringer, Alison L. “Theuerdank.” World Epics Website. 2023.
• Poor, Sara S., Alison L. Beringer, Olga Trokhimenko, eds. Gender Bonds, Gender Binds: Men, Women, and Family in Middle High German Literature. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021.
• Beringer, Alison L. “A Fate Worse than Death? Virgil’s ‘steinîn wîp’ in Jans der Enikel’s ‘Weltchronik’.” In Gender Bonds, Gender Binds: Men, Women, and Family in Middle High German Literature. Berlin: De Gruyter (2021): 177–97.
• Beringer, Alison L. The Sight of Semiramis: Medieval and Early Modern Narratives of the Queen of Babylon. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 487. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2016.