Chair, Division of Languages & Literature, Professor of English, Ralph S. Collins Professor in the Humanities

My academic specialty is medieval English literature, focusing particularly on William Langland’s fourteenth-century poem Piers Plowman. I have published a few scholarly articles on that poem, and I continue to work on editing an electronic edition of a manuscript of the C version of the poem as part of the Piers Plowman Electronic Archive. I taught in China for two years (1986-88), and at Maryville College I teach Chaucer (read in Middle English), History of the English Language, Shakespeare, Advanced Rhetoric and Grammar, the earlier half of surveys of western world literature or British literature, and composition courses.