Katharine Breen, a Ph.D. candidate in English, investigates in her dissertation the ways medieval writers, faced with an expanding and diversifying audience, presented their texts as emergency pedagogical tools. Entitled Habit May be Literature Forming: Disciplines of Reading Medieval English Texts, Breen’s study interrogates the definitions and uses of habit, arguing that far from being impediments to learning or merely elementary prerequisites, habits of mind are essential components of creative thinking: that is, the social and textual formation of, and contest over, habit is a condition of possibility for literature. Breen holds a Mabelle McLeod Lewis fellowship in her tenure at the Townsend Center.