Carol Braun Pasternack (1950 – September 2, 2020) was a professor of medieval English literature and language at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) from 1988 to 2013.
[1] Her research interests included history of the English language, Old and Middle English literature, theories concerning oral tradition (especially the techniques of scops or oral poets) and textual transmission of early medieval texts, feminist approaches to medieval literature, and sex and gender in the early Middle Ages.
Rosamund S. Allen, writing in the Modern Language Review in 1997 praised Pasternack for "establishing new ways of reading Old English [...] reject[ing] the 'New Critical' mode of treating Old English poems like modern written texts, with definable boundaries and an identifiable author.
Bridging the divide between oral and written texts that seems to invest much recent discussion, Pasternack instead invites readers to consider these both as inscribed texts and recordings of previously performed verse, which present aural rather than visual cues".
[3] Mary Dockray-Miller notes that Pasternack and Weston's edited collection is "the only essay collection focused exclusively on issues of sexuality and gender in pre- Conquest England [...] an enormously useful and comprehensive overview of the history of sexuality studies in general, in medieval scholarship more particularly, and in Anglo-Saxon studies most specifically.