Faculty Directory - Bio
Scott Thompson Smith
Assistant Professor of English
Contact
23 Burrowes Building
University Park, PA 16802
Office phone: 814-865-0028
Email: sts12@psu.edu
Office hours
Wednesday 10-12 and Thursday 1-3
Education
Ph.D. in English, University of Notre Dame
M.A. in Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University
M.A. in English, Truman State University
Research interests
Literature and culture of Anglo-Saxon England; legal discourse, land tenure, and property dispute in Anglo-Saxon England; literacy; Anglo-Latin literature; Old Norse literature; horror and the supernatural.
Publications
Of Kings and Cattle Thieves: The Rhetorical Work of the Fonthill Letter," JEGP 106 (2007): 447-467
“Marking Boundaries: Charters and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,” in Reading the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, edited by Alice Jorgenson (Brepols Press, forthcoming).
Review of A Place to Believe In: Locating Medieval Landscapes, ed. Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing (Penn State Press, 2006), in Religion and Literature 39.2 (2007): 109-111.
He is currently at work on a book project on land tenure and property dispute in early medieval England and the circulation of legal language and tropes in various Old English and Anglo-Latin texts.
Recent Selected Presentations
“Latin Diplomas and the Turn to Verse in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.” International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, London 2007: Anglo-Saxon Traces, 31 July 2007.
“Storied Land: Writing History and Making Space in Narratives of Property Dispute.” MLA Conference 2006, Philadelphia, 27 December 2006.
Course descriptions
ENGL 521 Old English
Ure ieldran, ða ðe ðas stowa ær hioldon, hie lufodon wisdom ond ðurh ðone hie begeaton welan and us læfdon. Her mon mæg giet gesion hiora swæð ac we him ne cunnon æfter spyrigean.
This course provides an introduction to the rich language and literature of early medieval England. While this is primarily a language class, it also contains a strong literary component. Students will acquire the basic linguistic knowledge necessary for reading Old English, beginning with short Old English texts early in the semester and progressing to a number of longer prose and poetic texts after midterm. In addition, the course offers some basic philological tools for understanding grammatical and phonological change in Old English.
ENGL 522 Beowulf
This seminar is devoted to the monumental Old English poem Beowulf. Surviving only in a single damaged manuscript dated c. 1000, the poem has become a “canonical” text since its first full translation into English by J. M. Kemble in 1837. Beowulf has furthermore maintained a regular presence in popular culture, inspiring numerous feature films, novels, comics, and games, while Seamus Heaney’s lauded translation in 2000 earned the poem renewed “serious” attention in the new millennium. In this course we go straight to the source, reading this complex and rewarding Old English poem in its entirety as we engage questions of language, style, and interpretation. We will also consider key critical issues surrounding the poem: manuscript context, dating, sources and analogues, structure and style, editing, and reception history. Students give one brief class presentation on assigned secondary material and submit a 20-page research paper at the end of the semester. ENGL 521 Old English (or its equivalent) is a prerequisite for the course.
ENGL 083S Weird Tales: Literature of the Supernatural and Fantastic
H. P. Lovecraft observed, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” Many writers have explored such fear of the unknown by imagining macabre and supernatural forces lurking just outside (or within) the everyday world. This course surveys the long tradition in Western literature that depicts the intrusion of supernatural forces into social order. The fantastic elements of these tales—monsters, madness, ghosts, and magic—might be their most well-known traits, but such literature can also express social desires and fears, and ruminate on personal and political history. The supernatural, in other words, works to reveal those individuals and institutions that face it. This course will explore “weird” writings from the medieval to the modern, investigating issues raised by each individual text and proposing possible connections between them. We will also consider this literature as an emerging genre in which writers actively engage their predecessors to create a self-aware tradition.
