[2][3] She attended Jefferson High School, where she was salutatorian and won a local Associated Press student writing contest two times in a row.
[4][5] She later obtained her BS (1974) in English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW) and took a break from higher education to teach language arts at religious school in the Milwaukee area.
[1][6] She has authored the books Job, Boethius, and Epic Truth (1994), The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (1994), Chaucer and the Universe of Learning (1996), Political Allegory in Late Medieval England (1999), Joan of Arc and Sacrificial Authorship (2003), and Eating Beauty (2006), and she has edited the volumes Divine Representations: Postmodernism and Spirituality (1994), Lay Sanctity, Medieval and Modern (2000), Joan of Arc and Spirituality (2003), Levinas and Medieval Literature (2009), Sacrifice, Scripture, and Substitution in Ancient Judaism and Christianity (2011), Magistra Doctissima (2013), and Saving Fear in Christian Spirituality (2020).
[1] Although she had originally taught and written on literature and English studies at Purdue, she had switched to teaching theological subjects after joining Notre Dame.
[6] In 2004, she held a public lecture on the history of Joan of Arc in film at the Religious Arts Festival in West Lafayette.