Jennifer Timmons is an Exchange Fellow from the University of Chicago, where she is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History. Jennifer holds her master’s degree from the same institution (2011) and her bachelor’s from the University of California at San Diego (2009). Her dissertation project, Venenum Bibit: The Theological Vocabulary of Poison in the Middle Ages, explores metaphors of poison, contamination, and disease as they pertain to theological debates and heresy. She is interested in medieval poison metaphors as imagery representing a specific mode of thought, adapted to make theological claims about the way that heretics and scholars alike willfully misinterpret scripture, and about the dangers of persuasive speech, deception, and hypocrisy. Jennifer will be affiliated with CéSor in Winter/Spring 2016 as she performs dissertation research in France.