Michael Adams | Judith H. Anderson | Penelope Anderson | Linda Charnes | Robert D. Fulk | Shannon Gayk | Patricia Clare Ingham | Karma Lochrie | Ellen MacKay | Kathy Overhulse Smith
Michael Adams, Assistant Professor of English
I am foremost a historian of English language, especially of English words, who also specializes in the history, theory, and practice of lexicography. I have had the good fortune to work on various dictionary projects, including the Middle English Dictionary the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4/e), and Word Histories and Mysteries (Houghton Mifflin, 2004). For several years, I was editor of Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America. I am currently finishing a book focused on the Middle English Dictionary and techniques of historical lexicography. I am also very interested in the relevance of Middle English to current speech: current projects include a formal, pragmatic, and stylistic history of the diminutive suffix –ie, from its origins in contact between Old Norse and Old English to the jargon of marble-playing and brand-names.
My literary interests are similarly broad, but focus on the late-Medieval period’s transition into the Early Modern, roughly from 1450-1550. I am currently writing articles about William Dunbar’s poetry and Margery Kempe’s book. I have also written about Early Modern literature, for instance, the poetry of Samuel Daniel (1990), the eccentric prose of the seventeenth-century radical Peter Chamberlen (1990).
Judith H. Anderson, Chancellor's Professor of English
My interests revolve around the creation, understanding, and value of imaginative thinking and writing. My single-author books best explain what I’m about. The first, on Langland’s Piers Plowman and Spenser’s Faerie Queene, engages intellectual and aesthetic relations between the late Middle Ages and the sixteenth century. Its core concern is the relation of figuration to knowing in these encyclopedic, culturally engaged poems. My second book, Biographical Truth, is about biographical fiction as much as biographical truth. It concerns the shaping, though fiction, of history, and examines the relations of biography, history, and Shakespearean drama.
My last three major books constitute a trilogy on language, rhetoric, and poetics. Words That Matter treats changing conceptions of language and its shaping influence on human perception. Translating Investments is a meditation on the functioning of metaphor (translatio) in Tudor-Stuart culture. It also questions the position of language and rhetoric within post-structuralism and cognitive science, highlighting connections between current problems and those in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries. Reading the Allegorical Intertext focuses on canonical narrative from Chaucer to Shakespeare and Milton. The intertext encompasses Kristevan intertextuality and traditional relationships of influence, imitation, allusion, and citation. My intertext is allegorical both because Spenser’s Faerie Queene is pivotal to it and because allegory encapsulates (and magnifies) the process of making meaning.
Penelope Anderson, Assistant Professor of English
I write and teach about early modern British literature, especially that of the English Civil Wars. I am particularly interested in the ways in which individuals and communities respond to the pressures of incommensurable ethical obligations, and the literary strategies that turn those conflicts into resources. I am currently working on a book project in which I investigate Civil War women writers’ appropriations of the classical discourse of friendship. Women writers, such as Lucy Hutchinson and Katherine Philips, exploit friendship’s potentially opposed loyalties – to the friend and to the state – in order to re-imagine conflicting allegiances to God, country, and family. In so doing, I argue, they provide an alternate pre-history of the emergence of the political state, one in which the bonds of political obligation can be fractured and reformed. This project draws together my interests in queer, feminist, and gender studies; early modern political theory; and manuscript studies and history of the book. My teaching includes all these areas, as well as canonical authors such as Shakespeare and, especially, Milton.
Linda Charnes, Professor of English and West European Studies
Professor Charnes specializes in Shakespeare Studies and early modern culture through the Restoration and long seventeenth century. Her research focuses on the uses of Shakespeare in the arenas of mass culture, literature, film, and contemporary international politics. Her other areas of expertise include Restoration literature, Milton, theoretical approaches to performativity, psychoanalysis and the performance of everyday life, political philosophy from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, and all areas of critical theory. Her first book, Notorious Identity: Materializing the Subject in Shakespeare, showcased Shakespeare’s use of legendary figures to critique emerging problems of fame and notoriety. Her second book, Hamlet’s Heirs: Shakespeare and the Politics of a New Millennium, traced the legacy of Shakespeare’s most famous princes—Hamlet and Hal—and their impact, covert and overt, on contemporary British and American politics and society. She is currently working on two new book projects: one on Milton and the political psychology of the post-Interregnum, and the other on Shakespearean performance and the impact of new interactive media on concepts such as “audience,” spectatorship, and performative identification.
Robert Fulk, Chancellor's Professor of English
Adjunct Professor of Germanic Studies
Professor Fulk is a medievalist and a linguist, specializing in Germanic (especially Old English and Old Icelandic) and Celtic languages and literatures, the history of the English language, and comparative Indo-European linguistics. Some particular areas of research are Old and Middle English dialectology, textual criticism, phonological and morphological change, and early Germanic metrics. With Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles he has edited Klaeber’s Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg (Toronto, 2008), and with Christopher M. Cain he wrote A History of Old English Literature (Oxford, 2002). Soon to appear in Skaldic Poetry in the Scandinavian Middle Ages, ed. Margaret Clunies Ross, Edith Marold, Guðrún Nordal, Diana Whaley, and Kari Ellen Gade, 9 vols. (Turnhout, 2007-), are editions of works by Þormóðr Bersason Kolbrúnarskáld, Haraldr hárfagri, Þjóðólfr ór Hvini, Þorbjörn hornklofi, Gunnhildr konungamóðir, Hákon góði, Eyvindr Finnsson skaldaspillir, Þorkell klyppr Þórðarson, Sighvatr Þorðarson, as well as some anonymous compositions. Professor Fulk is currently at work on an edition of the Old English Canons of Theodore, as well as grammars of Old and Middle English. He teaches particularly in the areas of Old and Middle English language and literature, as well as medieval Irish and Welsh language and literature. He is Executive Editor for Language and Literature of the journal Anglo-Saxon, published at the University of Aberdeen.
Shannon Gayk, Assistant Professor of English
My research and teaching focus on the relationships among religion, visual and material culture, and literary form in the fifteenth century. I am currently completing a book on religious art, vernacular literature, and reformist theologies in fifteenth-century England entitled, Reformation of the Image in Fifteenth-Century Religious Writings. I also am co-editing a collection of essays, tentatively titled, Form and Reform: Reading the Fifteenth Century and beginning a second book project on Middle English prose. I have presented and published papers on John Lydgate, Thomas Hoccleve, Piers Plowman, Chaucer’s fifteenth-century legacy, Wycliffite writing, and sermon literature. My courses also explore the relationships between visual experience, images and texts, aesthetics and theology.
Patricia Clare Ingham, Associate Professor of English
My research and teaching focus on both on Chaucer and on texts of Medieval Romance from the high to the late Middle Ages, particularly in light of psychoanalytic, postcolonial, gender, and cultural theory. My first book, Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (University of Pennsylvania Press, May 2001) offers a systematic reconsideration of Arthurian literature in Britain in the context of the shared dreamings and political contestations between England and Wales from the twelfth century onwards. My work is impelled both by an interest in what counts as history and with how contemporary theories might help us to deepen our understanding of the past.
I am currently at work on two book-length projects, each of which continues my interest historicism and its vicissitudes. All Things New asks why, despite evidence regarding the innovations of medieval culture, the category of the "medieval new" still seems such an oxymoron. The project engages both narratives of periodization (and the current turn to St. Paul’s in the service of a “new universalism” by scholars such as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek) and the material innovations of technology, art, and text. Chaucer’s Haunted Aesthetics takes up the hoary question of “medieval aesthetic” so as ultimately to recast claims about the “timeless” quality of Chaucer’s poetry in favor of its untimeliness, its multiple engagements with past, present, and future.
Joan Pong Linton, Associate Professor of English
I have taught a range of courses, including courses on Renaissance/early modern literature, literary theory, introductory courses in literature and writing, and, from time to time, a course on community service writing. In my research, I am generally interested in the diverse ways literary and cultural productions relate to history and theory. In addition to The Romance of the New World: Gender and the Literary Formations of English Colonialism (1998, 2007), I have also written on the prose romances, early modern women writers (especially the Protestant martyr, Anne Askew), and Shakespeare. My current research focuses on trickster as a figure of/agency for justice in early modern English literature and drama. In its creaturely materializations trickster as figure and as agency inhabits the borders between the human and the nonhuman, and between sovereignty and governmentality. My research thus brings together form and life, aesthetics and ethics in their engagements with the political; it feeds my passion for narrative, storytelling, and the figural politics of theater.
Karma Lochrie, Professor of English
I am a professor of medieval literature with an interest in gender and sexuality studies. My most recent book is Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2005), which argues that normativity as a technology of heterosexuality did not exist for the Middle Ages and calls for a radical revision of the categories with which we study medieval sexuality. It examines female sexuality in particular in medical, religious, and exotic travel discourse, as well as Chaucer, in an effort to suggest an alternative landscape for medieval sexuality once heteronormativity is abandoned. My current work is concerned with the project of theorizing and historicizing utopianism for the Middle Ages, in terms of a range of medieval discourses, including the philosophical tradition of cosmopolitanism, the dream-vision trajectory extending from the Dream of Scipio and Macrobius, travel literature, and medieval geographical and cartographic traditions. I co-edited a 2006 volume of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies devoted to a reconsideration of the ways we study utopianism in medieval and Renaissance studies. In addition, I am working on queer temporalities by way of considering a critique of and alternative to Lee Edelman’s provocative argument in No Future (2005). I teach courses in medieval studies, queer theory, and gender studies.
Ellen MacKay, Assistant Professor of English
A specialist in early theatre, especially that of Tudor-Stuart England, Ellen MacKay’s work explores the complex impact of performance’s ephemerality on the idea and practice of history. Her first book project, on the catastrophic imperative of theatrical performance, studies the long record of disaster in the English Renaissance playhouse (fires, plagues, and sundry fatal accidents) and concludes that theatre was expected to precipitate disaster—and that the falls of Rome and of the Roman Catholic Church supplied proof to early modern Englishwomen and men of the damage it could and would do. She has a second book project underway on sea spectacles from Nero to Wagner that considers the utopian somatics of un-representable performance. She has published on Canadian theatre, on the performance of self-translation that the Immigration and Naturalization Service require, and the disciplinary legacy of Dionysus in 69. Some of her teaching interests include anti-theatricalism, early women dramatists, ‘extreme’ theatre (medieval crucifixion scenes, Grand Guignol, Roman holidays), and reception/audience studies.
Kathy Overhulse Smith, Clinical Associate Professor of English
Although I spend a considerable amount of my time doing various kinds of administrative work both for the English department and for the composition program, my academic interests, when I am able to indulge them, tend to focus on the intersection between early modern British poetry and early modern theories of poetry, logic, and rhetoric. A firm believer in C. S. Lewis’s claim that “Rhetoric is the greatest barrier between us and our ancestors. . . . If ever the passion for formal rhetoric returns, the whole story will have to be rewritten and many judgments may be reversed,” I take special delight in teaching undergraduate courses that permit me to share these interests. Yet, whether I am teaching a course on early seventeenth-century poetry or an introductory literature course to first-year students, my approach and my goals are pretty much the same: essentially, I aim to engage students in the reading to the extent that will prompt them to undertake the work of acquiring an understanding of and appreciation for texts that, for many of them, initially seem remote and irrelevant. To that end, we practice a critical approach to our reading that Lester Beaurline once described in the introduction to his essay on Ben Jonson’s shorter poems: “Since art is a matter of choices, appreciation requires a knowledge of alternatives, and when we try to imagine the possible choices that lay before a poet, we can better understand his accomplishment. In other words, if appreciation is an act of imaginative sympathy, adequate criticism demands that we compare what a poet wrote with what he might have written.” To the extent that my class prepares and enables students to participate in that act of imaginative sympathy and so begin to rewrite the story, as Lewis foretold, I consider it successful.
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