LARISSA “KAT” TRACY (BA honors, Florida State University, 1996; PhD, Medieval Literature, Trinity College, Dublin, 2000) is Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her work focuses on thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth century English literature that looks back to the pre-Conquest period in England and the Viking Age, with cross-cultural contacts in medieval French, Irish, and Welsh and a specific focus on social justice, law, medicine, and judicial punishment. She also researches and teaches on modern distortions of the Middle Ages by white supremacists, the Nazis, and the Confederacy. Her publications include Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature (D.S. Brewer, 2012), Women of the Gilte Legende (D.S. Brewer, 2003) and the edited collections Heads Will Roll: Decapitation in the Medieval and Early Modern Imagination, with Jeff Massey (Brill, 2012), Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages (D.S. Brewer, 2013), Wounds and Wound Repair in Medieval Culture, with Kelly DeVries (Brill, 2015), Flaying in the Premodern World: Practice and Representation (D.S. Brewer, 2017), Medieval and Early Modern Murder (Boydell, 2018), and Treason: Medieval and Early Modern Adultery, Betrayal, and Shame (Brill 2019). She has published articles on violence, fabliaux, comedy, Norse sagas, romance, gender, hagiography, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; she is also the series editor for Explorations in Medieval Culture (Brill), and she served as the editor of Eolas: The Journal for the American Society of Irish Medieval Studies (ASIMS) for six years (2013–2019). She is the past president of ASIMS. In 2016, she was a Visiting Scholar at St. John’s College, Oxford. She currently serves as the Vice President of MEARCSTAPA, a professional society dedicated to the study of medieval monstrosity. She has appeared in several National Geographic, Discovery Channel, and History Channel documentaries including Dark Marvels and The Unbelievable! hosted by Dan Aykroyd. She has appeared on Wondrium’s series Sex in the Middle Ages. Her work on medievalisms has been published by Salon.com, Business Insider, Elite Daily, Entertainment Weekly, The Wrap; and Women in the World (New York Times). Since 2018, she has been a practitioner of Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA), building on her passion for researching swords and other bladed weapons and their proper use in medieval combat.