This is a syllabus for my fall 2015 First Year Seminar on the Arthurian legend and its literature.

Proposing an alternative phraseology of “unbecoming” to accent the risky, tentative, epigenetic processes of human development.

Proposing an alternative phraseology of “unbecoming” to accent the risky, tentative, epigenetic processes of human development.

contribution to roundtable on “Becoming Human” co-sponsored by the Middle English and Chaucer forums

contribution to roundtable on “Becoming Human” co-sponsored by the Middle English and Chaucer forums

Nearly all scholars who work on medieval or early modern texts at some point work from digital facsimiles. There are advantages and disadvantages to such objects: what they might offer in terms of convenience and availability, they lack in material information. We can adjust the nature of what questions we ask of which object, consulting digital…[Read more]

Read 8 January 2016 in Austin, TX, at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, session number 218, “Quantity in English Verse: Linguistic and Neuroscience-Based Challenges to the Accentual Paradigm.” This short historiographical paper was the half-time show in our roundtable—an interlude between the session’s more substantive linguis…[Read more]

This article is a review of the Haan-Lewalski OUP edition of Milton’s shorter. The book, I argue, is inexcusably difficult to use, and suggests that perhaps the time has come to replace long, very expensive tomes with digital editions.

In twelfth‐century Germany, where mysticism was a common phenomenon, Hildegard of Bingen and her visions were readily accepted — making it all the more significant that, despite the generally receptive conditions, Hildegard went to such trouble to make sure her visions and her writings were endorsed by the Church. In contrast, Joan of Arc, liv…[Read more]

Wikis have become enormously attractive to Internet users because they are open-access web pages or networks of web pages that can be modified by any interested editors, making them perpetual works-in-progress that evolve and change at the behest of their contributors. Wikipedia, the limitless fountain of collected, and sometimes inaccurate,…[Read more]