Medieval literature is a highly productive area of research and teaching in the department, balancing a number of approaches. Faculty and students work on canonical and non-canonical texts and in related fields such as paleography, history of the book, textual editing, and translation. At the same time, their interests regularly take them into literary theory, cultural and social history, intertextuality, and questions of gender and representation.
For graduate students, the department and the college provide competitive funding sources for conference travel and dissertation research. There are opportunities to learn languages in intensive summer programs and to teach courses in medieval literature in English and Comparative Literature. Students in the department regularly work with faculty in sister departments such as Comparative Literature, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, German, History, and Classics. With strong faculty mentoring, they publish their work in top-tier academic journals and begin successful careers as scholars and teachers.
Recent Grad Courses
- Chaucer
- Middle English Literature
- Medieval to Renaissance: The Early Modern Reception
- Love and Desire in the Middle Ages
- Manuscript and Print Culture
- Old English Language
- Beowulf
- History of the English Language
- Inventing Authority in Late-Medieval England
- Reading Arthurian Legend, Reading Troy
- Rhetoric, Performance, Desire: Medieval Inventions of Subjectivity
- Reading Medieval
Graduate Faculty
with particular interests in Chaucer, continental and Latin literary relations, authorship in trilingual England
Early medieval literature (Old English and Anglo-Latin), History of the English Language
Graduate Students
Old English Literature, medieval literature, representations of military history, and popular interpretations of the Middle Ages
Book History and Manuscript Studies; Medical Humanities; Middle English Poetry