The manuscript now called the Salisbury Breviary (Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, MS lat. 17294) contains the only extant illustrated cycle of of the Life of St Edith of Wilton; the fifteen miniatures accompany the readings for the feast of St Edith. These images emphasize the connections among Edith’s holiness, royal genealogy, and…[Read more]

The performances of Christ in the text of The Dream of the Rood construct a masculinity for Christ that is majestic, martial, and specifically heterosexual and that relies on a fragile opposition with a femininity defined as dominated Other in the figure of the Cross. His particularly constructed masculinity, explored rather than merely assumed or…[Read more]

An entry in the Women Medievalists and the Academy collection, this brief biography presents Cambridge historian Mary Bateson, scholar and suffragist, who lived on the cusp of the opportunity for academic professionalization for women. Her life illustrates an inspiring blend of serious scholarship, accessible publication, and devoted political…[Read more]

Feminist and gender scholars working in Anglo-Saxon studies in the past ten years have been asking new and important questions of a variety of Old English and Anglo-Latin texts. Most crucially, this interdisciplinary new work redefines the historiographical paradigms of Anglo-Saxon cultural production and reception so that women must now be…[Read more]

Abstract: This short edition makes available for the first time three Middle English verse prayers to Christ from the Mohun Hours, a fourteenth-century Book of Hours held by the Boston Public Library (MS 124). Late medieval Books of Hours have received substantial recent critical attention as expressions of devotional literacy practiced mainly by…[Read more]

Historical source study of the last text in the composite manuscript Lon- don, BL Cotton Faustina B.iii can shed light on the transmission and use of chronicle texts and their translations in late medieval England. The author of the Middle English verse Life of St. Æthelthryth used John Trevisa’s English translation of Ranulf Higden’s Poly…[Read more]

Emphasizing the peculiar, the perverse, the clandestine and the scandalous, this volume opens up a critical discourse on sexuality and visual culture in early modern Italy. Contributors consider not just painted (conventional) representations of sexual activities and eroticized bodies, but also images from print media, drawings, sculpted objects…[Read more]

Questo volume propone un discorso critico sulla sessualità e sulla cultura visiva dell’Italia rinascimentale. I saggi raccolti tentano di fare luce su una serie di zone d’ombra, dando spazio a tutte quelle pratiche o preferenze considerate in genere come alternative o anomalie, e a un’ampia varietà di scenari “scandalosi”. Particolare attenzione…[Read more]

This handout serves as a guide for student peer-reviewers to provide useful feedback to the writer. The open-ended questions walk the reviewer through the rhetorical analysis essay and provide a structure for evaluating the thesis, organization, rhetorical strategies, and use of pathos, ethos, logos, and kairos in the paper. The Rhetorical…[Read more]

A detailed description of an innovative, but short-lived, graduate training program for two-year college faculty that began in 1975 at Carnegie Mellon University may offer possibilities for new programs that can benefit both two-year colleges and universities.

This essay analyzes the illustration sequences of the four magnificent Gospel books made for Judith of Flanders within the context of the political chaos in pre-Conquest England. These deluxe display books indicate one of the ways that literacy and literary patronage provided cultural legitimacy and social status for secular women in the late…[Read more]

This handout explains in clear and simple terms what a strong thesis statement should–and should not be. Examples of the four main types of ‘weak’ thesis statements are given, along with four corresponding ‘strong’ thesis statements. I have successfully used this handout in workshopping students’ thesis ideas.

In late 1991, an editor at the Sunday New York Times Book Review asked me to write a feature article about that uniquely American genre, the Indian captivity narrative. When the editor called, I was dean of the College of Humanities at the University of Arizona. I accepted the Times assignment in hopes that writing this article might prove a…[Read more]

This handout explains in clear and simple terms what a strong thesis statement should–and should not be. Examples of the four main types of ‘weak’ thesis statements are given, along with four corresponding ‘strong’ thesis statements. I have successfully used this handout in workshopping students’ thesis ideas.

Aggregate larp rules are a type of code that runs on humans. Code can be thought of as a linguistic form that is both declarative and imperative; it is both truth and command (Buswell 2009). In aggregate larp, elements of the game’s
diegesis are rendered codic, or playable, allowing players a degree of autonomy from game staff. Through the m…[Read more]

Prepared for session 366 on the 2017 convention program, Shapes of the English Major Today, arranged by the ADE Ad Hoc Committee on the English Major, this presentation summarizes trends in bachelor’s degree completions using time series degree completions data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education System (IPEDS), as compiled by the National…[Read more]

372 [HUM] 19th Century Literature of the British Empire and the Americas. 3 credit hours. Literary and cultural texts in English from 1800 to 1900 focusing on global British literature and literatures of the Americas.

My investment in the course.
I am concerned about our country’s inability to work against climate change, the mass i…[Read more]

Panel Title Writing Studies at the MLA: The Past and Future of English Studies

This is a slightly revised version of the paper I gave for the Out of Narrative Bounds panel organized by the forums TC Medical Humanities and Health Studies and TC Age Studies. This panel was chosen as representative of the presidential theme, Boundary Conditions. In this paper I use Jean-Dominque Bauby’s memoir, The Diving-Bell and the…[Read more]