Rachel discusses the myth and symbolism of Covid in relationship to medieval history and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. She also addresses why she as the daughter of the a physician could see through the narrative from the beginning.
Rachel Fulton Brown is Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago, where she offers courses on the history of Christianity, medieval European religious, cultural, and intellectual history, and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.
She is the author of From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800-1200(2002) and Mary and the Art of Prayer: The Hours of the Virgin in Medieval Christian Life and Thought(2017), and she has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Humanities Center, among others.
In her public life, she blogs as Fencing Bear at Prayer, and she lectures on Logos, Tolkien, and medieval history at Unauthorized.tv. The Dragon Common Room is her online classroom for training poets in the arts of the Christian imagination. She livestreams weekly on The Mosaic Ark, where she and co-host Kilts Khalfan will take you on a nautical journey through the mythology and symbolism of the Internet.
She founded the Corona Testing Control Group at the University of Chicago in September 2022 to pray for wisdom and guidance against the dragons of modernity ravaging our college campuses with their vaccine mandates and suppression of speech.
