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Jonathan Hsy

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Jonathan Hsy is Professor of English at George Washington University, where he is also Affiliated Faculty in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Sigur Center for Asian Studies. He specializes in literary and cultural studies, and his work explores the intersections of language, gender, race, and disability (from the Middle Ages to the present). He is currently the Molina Fellow in the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences at The Huntington Library, 2024-25.

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Arizona State University

Peter Shaskey-Fredrick

Woosong University

Aberystwyth University

Ursula K. Frederick

University of Canberra

Hangzhou Dianzi University

Catherine Boland Erkkila

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Noreen Naseem Rodríguez

Michigan State University

University of California, Los Angeles

Michael Heffley

Wesleyan University

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Books by Jonathan Hsy

Antiracist Medievalisms: From "Yellow Peril" to Black Lives Matter (Arc Humanities Press, 2021). Open Access via Project Muse https://muse.jhu.edu/book/83922 or OAPEN https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/61385

A Cultural History of Disability in the Middle Ages (co-edited with Tory V. Pearman and Joshua R. Eyler). Volume 2 of A Cultural History of Disability, general eds. David Bolt and Robert McRuer (Bloomsbury, 2020)

Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature (Ohio State University Press, 2013). Open Access: https://muse.jhu.edu/book/27530

Journal Issues by Jonathan Hsy

Co-edited with Candace Barrington, Chaucer's Global Compaignye. Special Issue of Literature Compass (Global Circulation Project) Vol. 15, No.6 (June 2018)

Co-edited with Mary Kate Hurley and A.B. Kraebel, Thinking Across Tongues. Special Issue of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 8, Issue 3 (September 2017)

Articles (Academic Journals) by Jonathan Hsy

Disability, Space, and Racial Injustice: Life Writing at Angel Island Immigration Station, 1910-1940. Journal of American Ethnic History 43.3 (Spring 2024): 34-56 [uncorrected proofs]

This study integrates race and disability into a literary-historical analysis of the mostly anony... more This study integrates race and disability into a literary-historical analysis of the mostly anonymous poetry composed by Chinese migrants and inscribed onto the walls of the men's barracks of the US Immigration Station at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, 1910-1940. Scholarship in Asian American and Asian diaspora studies has approached this body of work as a modern reinvention of traditional Chinese poetic forms within a US context. This study considers the men's barracks a protest space created under disabling conditions of confinement, and it demonstrates how Angel Island detainees critiqued the racialized and ableist systems of social control that operated at the station. The poets attest to undergoing invasive imperial regimes of bodily inspection and medicalized racial exclusion, and they document lived experiences of chronic illness, depression, and the anguished temporality of detention space. As corpus of disabled life writing by early Asian American and Asian diaspora writers, Angel Island poetry offers wider access to non-English historical vocabularies of disability as well as environmental and holistic understandings of embodied conditions beyond Western diagnostic models. As a built environmental archive and a National Historic Landmark, Angel Island is a significant cultural site for exploring how race and disability operate concurrently as social constructions.

Chaucer's Brown Faces: Race, Interpretation, Adaptation. Chaucer Review 56.4 (2021) [uncorrected proofs]

This article combines critical race theory and adaptation studies to investigate racialized brown... more This article combines critical race theory and adaptation studies to investigate racialized brownness in the Canterbury Tales and contemporary Chaucer receptions. The first section offers a close reading of somatic brownness in Chaucer's Romaunt of the Rose and General Prologue, and it incorporates brown into a constellation of color terms-in conjunction with whiteness and blackness-that Chaucerians deploy to theorize medieval race metaphors and race-making. The second section builds on sociological research to examine constructions of brown as a capacious racial designation in the Middle Ages and today. The third section examines creative updates of Chaucer that explore meanings of brownness across time and space: Nigerian British poet Patience Agbabi's Telling Tales; Mexican American poet Frank Mundo's Brubury Tales; and Indian director Avie Luthra's "The Sea Captain's Tale, " a screen adaptation of the Shipman's Tale. The conclusion considers theories of "brown kinship" and their implications for Chaucer reception studies globally.

Queer Environments: Reanimating "Adam Scriveyn." postmedieval 9.3 (September 2018)

Editors’ Introduction: Chaucer’s Global Orbits and Global Communities (with Candace Barrington). Special Issue: “Chaucer’s Global Compaignye,” Global Circulation Project, Literature Compass 15: 6 (June 2018)

by Jonathan Hsy and Candace Barrington

Encompassing perspectives beyond what Braj B. Kachru terms the "Inner Circle" of Anglophone hegem... more Encompassing perspectives beyond what Braj B. Kachru terms the "Inner Circle" of Anglophone hegemony, this collection of essays presents a vivid and distinct opportunity to appreciate how Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales adapts to life across disparate languages (Persian, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Danish, Spanish, Turkish, American Sign Language, and internal varieties of London English) while also moving across cultures (Shiite Iran, Brazilian Gauchoria, Tokyo academia, rural Denmark, Mexican universities, Ottoman Turkey, US Deaf culture, and London's multiethnic East End communities). The term compaignye, a quintessentially Chaucerian keyword absorbed into Middle English through Anglo-French, suggests an intimate multitude of people sharing a common interest or purpose. To this end, our textual compaignye incorporates contributors who are academics in the traditional sense as well as authors and artists who operate alongside normative structures of the academy. Many of the compaignye's so-called "nonacademics" have garnered prestigious awards for their creative work, and "amateur" cultural artifacts reveal that a deep love of Chaucerian material characterizes both academic and nonacademic endeavors. Such a compaignye, with its many forms of expertise, can expand our knowledge by creating "a vibrant resonance," as Carolyn Dinshaw explains, between "amateur [popular] medievalism and professional [academic] medievalism."

Linguistic Entrapment: Interlanguage, Bivernacularity, and Life Across Tongues. postmedieval 9.2 (June 2018)

Editors’ Introduction: Thinking Across Tongues (with Mary Kate Hurley and A.B. Kraebel). Special Issue: “Thinking Across Tongues,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 8, Issue 3 (September 2017): 270-276

Symptom and Surface: Disruptive Deafness and Medieval Medical Authority. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry (August 2016)

Language Ecologies: Ethics, Community, and Digital Affect. PMLA 131.2 (March 2016)

Close Listening: Talking Books, Blind Readers, and Medieval Worldbuilding. postmedieval 7.2 (Summer 2016)

Analytical Survey: Encountering Disability in the Middle Ages (with Richard H. Godden). New Medieval Literatures, Vol. 15 (for 2013), eds. Laura Ashe, David Lawton, and Wendy Scase (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2015), pp. 313-339

by Jonathan Hsy and Richard Godden

New Medieval Literatures is an annual journal of work on medieval textual cultures. Its scope is ... more New Medieval Literatures is an annual journal of work on medieval textual cultures. Its scope is inclusive of work across the theoretical, archival, philological, and historicist methodologies associated with medieval literary studies. The title announces an interest both in new writing about medieval culture and in new academic writing. As well as featuring challenging new articles, each issue includes an analytical survey by a leading international medievalist of recent work in an emerging or established field. The editors aim to engage with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages and now. Within this generous brief, they recognize only two criteria: excellence and originality.

Blind Advocacy: Blind Readers, Disability Theory, and Accessing John Gower. Accessus 1.1 (2013): article 2

Mobile Language-Networks and Medieval Travel Writing. postmedieval 4.2 (June 2013)

Remediated Verse: Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee and Patience Agbabi’s "Unfinished Business" (with Candace Barrington). postmedieval 6.2 (June 2015)

by Candace Barrington and Jonathan Hsy

Global Chaucers: Reflections on Collaboration and Digital Futures (with Candace Barrington). Accessus 2.2 (2015): article 3

by Candace Barrington and Jonathan Hsy

Between Species: Animal-Human Bilingualism and Medieval Texts. Booldly bot meekly: Essays on the Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages in Honour of Roger Ellis. Eds. René Tixier and Catherine Batt. The Medieval Translator 14 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2018), pp. 563-579

Antiracist Medievalisms: From "Yellow Peril" to Black Lives Matter (Arc Humanities Press, 2021). Open Access via Project Muse https://muse.jhu.edu/book/83922 or OAPEN https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/61385

A Cultural History of Disability in the Middle Ages (co-edited with Tory V. Pearman and Joshua R. Eyler). Volume 2 of A Cultural History of Disability, general eds. David Bolt and Robert McRuer (Bloomsbury, 2020)

Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature (Ohio State University Press, 2013). Open Access: https://muse.jhu.edu/book/27530

Co-edited with Candace Barrington, Chaucer's Global Compaignye. Special Issue of Literature Compass (Global Circulation Project) Vol. 15, No.6 (June 2018)

Co-edited with Mary Kate Hurley and A.B. Kraebel, Thinking Across Tongues. Special Issue of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 8, Issue 3 (September 2017)

Disability, Space, and Racial Injustice: Life Writing at Angel Island Immigration Station, 1910-1940. Journal of American Ethnic History 43.3 (Spring 2024): 34-56 [uncorrected proofs]

This study integrates race and disability into a literary-historical analysis of the mostly anony... more This study integrates race and disability into a literary-historical analysis of the mostly anonymous poetry composed by Chinese migrants and inscribed onto the walls of the men's barracks of the US Immigration Station at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, 1910-1940. Scholarship in Asian American and Asian diaspora studies has approached this body of work as a modern reinvention of traditional Chinese poetic forms within a US context. This study considers the men's barracks a protest space created under disabling conditions of confinement, and it demonstrates how Angel Island detainees critiqued the racialized and ableist systems of social control that operated at the station. The poets attest to undergoing invasive imperial regimes of bodily inspection and medicalized racial exclusion, and they document lived experiences of chronic illness, depression, and the anguished temporality of detention space. As corpus of disabled life writing by early Asian American and Asian diaspora writers, Angel Island poetry offers wider access to non-English historical vocabularies of disability as well as environmental and holistic understandings of embodied conditions beyond Western diagnostic models. As a built environmental archive and a National Historic Landmark, Angel Island is a significant cultural site for exploring how race and disability operate concurrently as social constructions.

Chaucer's Brown Faces: Race, Interpretation, Adaptation. Chaucer Review 56.4 (2021) [uncorrected proofs]

This article combines critical race theory and adaptation studies to investigate racialized brown... more This article combines critical race theory and adaptation studies to investigate racialized brownness in the Canterbury Tales and contemporary Chaucer receptions. The first section offers a close reading of somatic brownness in Chaucer's Romaunt of the Rose and General Prologue, and it incorporates brown into a constellation of color terms-in conjunction with whiteness and blackness-that Chaucerians deploy to theorize medieval race metaphors and race-making. The second section builds on sociological research to examine constructions of brown as a capacious racial designation in the Middle Ages and today. The third section examines creative updates of Chaucer that explore meanings of brownness across time and space: Nigerian British poet Patience Agbabi's Telling Tales; Mexican American poet Frank Mundo's Brubury Tales; and Indian director Avie Luthra's "The Sea Captain's Tale, " a screen adaptation of the Shipman's Tale. The conclusion considers theories of "brown kinship" and their implications for Chaucer reception studies globally.

Queer Environments: Reanimating "Adam Scriveyn." postmedieval 9.3 (September 2018)

Editors’ Introduction: Chaucer’s Global Orbits and Global Communities (with Candace Barrington). Special Issue: “Chaucer’s Global Compaignye,” Global Circulation Project, Literature Compass 15: 6 (June 2018)

by Jonathan Hsy and Candace Barrington

Encompassing perspectives beyond what Braj B. Kachru terms the "Inner Circle" of Anglophone hegem... more Encompassing perspectives beyond what Braj B. Kachru terms the "Inner Circle" of Anglophone hegemony, this collection of essays presents a vivid and distinct opportunity to appreciate how Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales adapts to life across disparate languages (Persian, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Danish, Spanish, Turkish, American Sign Language, and internal varieties of London English) while also moving across cultures (Shiite Iran, Brazilian Gauchoria, Tokyo academia, rural Denmark, Mexican universities, Ottoman Turkey, US Deaf culture, and London's multiethnic East End communities). The term compaignye, a quintessentially Chaucerian keyword absorbed into Middle English through Anglo-French, suggests an intimate multitude of people sharing a common interest or purpose. To this end, our textual compaignye incorporates contributors who are academics in the traditional sense as well as authors and artists who operate alongside normative structures of the academy. Many of the compaignye's so-called "nonacademics" have garnered prestigious awards for their creative work, and "amateur" cultural artifacts reveal that a deep love of Chaucerian material characterizes both academic and nonacademic endeavors. Such a compaignye, with its many forms of expertise, can expand our knowledge by creating "a vibrant resonance," as Carolyn Dinshaw explains, between "amateur [popular] medievalism and professional [academic] medievalism."

Linguistic Entrapment: Interlanguage, Bivernacularity, and Life Across Tongues. postmedieval 9.2 (June 2018)

Editors’ Introduction: Thinking Across Tongues (with Mary Kate Hurley and A.B. Kraebel). Special Issue: “Thinking Across Tongues,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 8, Issue 3 (September 2017): 270-276

Symptom and Surface: Disruptive Deafness and Medieval Medical Authority. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry (August 2016)

Language Ecologies: Ethics, Community, and Digital Affect. PMLA 131.2 (March 2016)

Close Listening: Talking Books, Blind Readers, and Medieval Worldbuilding. postmedieval 7.2 (Summer 2016)

Analytical Survey: Encountering Disability in the Middle Ages (with Richard H. Godden). New Medieval Literatures, Vol. 15 (for 2013), eds. Laura Ashe, David Lawton, and Wendy Scase (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2015), pp. 313-339

by Jonathan Hsy and Richard Godden

New Medieval Literatures is an annual journal of work on medieval textual cultures. Its scope is ... more New Medieval Literatures is an annual journal of work on medieval textual cultures. Its scope is inclusive of work across the theoretical, archival, philological, and historicist methodologies associated with medieval literary studies. The title announces an interest both in new writing about medieval culture and in new academic writing. As well as featuring challenging new articles, each issue includes an analytical survey by a leading international medievalist of recent work in an emerging or established field. The editors aim to engage with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages and now. Within this generous brief, they recognize only two criteria: excellence and originality.

Blind Advocacy: Blind Readers, Disability Theory, and Accessing John Gower. Accessus 1.1 (2013): article 2

Mobile Language-Networks and Medieval Travel Writing. postmedieval 4.2 (June 2013)

Remediated Verse: Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee and Patience Agbabi’s "Unfinished Business" (with Candace Barrington). postmedieval 6.2 (June 2015)

by Candace Barrington and Jonathan Hsy

Global Chaucers: Reflections on Collaboration and Digital Futures (with Candace Barrington). Accessus 2.2 (2015): article 3

by Candace Barrington and Jonathan Hsy

Between Species: Animal-Human Bilingualism and Medieval Texts. Booldly bot meekly: Essays on the Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages in Honour of Roger Ellis. Eds. René Tixier and Catherine Batt. The Medieval Translator 14 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2018), pp. 563-579

Distemporality: Richard III's Body and the Car Park. Upstart 2013-08-12

Charles d’Orléans and a Disorienting Preposition/La Préposition Désorientée and Charles of Orleans.” kadar koli 8 (Summer 2013)

"Be more strange and bold": Kissing Lepers and Female Same-Sex Desire in The Book of Margery Kempe. Early Modern Women Journal 5 (2010)

Afterword: Intersectionality and Coalitions. Women's Literary Cultures in the Global Middle Ages: Speaking Internationally, eds. Kathryn Loveridge, Liz Herbert McAvoy, Sue Niebrzydowski, and Vicki Kay Price (D.S. Brewer, 2023), pp. 293-302. [uncorrected proofs]

Introduction: Disabilities in Motion (with Tory V. Pearman and Joshua R. Eyler). A Cultural History of Disability in the Middle Ages, eds. Hsy, Pearman, and Eyler. Volume 2 of A Cultural History of Disability, gen. eds. Robert McRuer and David Bolt (Bloomsbury, 2020), pp. 1-18 [uncorrected proofs]

Phantom Sounds. How We Read: Tales, Fury, Nothing, Sound, eds. Kaitlin Heller and Suzanne Akbari (Brooklyn: punctum books, 2019), pp. 103-111

Afterlives (with Candace Barrington). A New Companion to Chaucer, ed. Peter Brown (Chichester, UK: Wiley & Sons, 2019): pp. 7-19

Diverging Forms: Disability and the Monk’s Tales. Chaucer and the Subversion of Form, eds. Jessica Rosenfeld and Thomas Prendergast (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 85-98

Universal Design and Its Discontents (with Richard H. Godden). Disrupting the Digital Humanities, eds. Dorothy Kim and Jesse Stommel (Brooklyn: punctum books, 2018), pp. 91-115

Gower and Theory: Old Books, New Matters. Routledge Research Companion to John Gower, eds. R.F. Yeager, Brian Gastle, and Ana Sáez-Hidalgo (Routledge, 2017), pp. 9-20

The Monk’s Tale: Disability/Ability. Open Access Companion to "The Canterbury Tales," eds. Candace Barrington, Brantley Bryant, Richard H. Godden, and Daniel T. Kline. Published online September 2016, revision published September 2017

Watery Metaphor. Oceanic New York, ed. Steve Mentz (Brooklyn, NY: punctum books, 2015), pp. 177-185

Disability. Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, eds. David Hillman and Ulrika Maude (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 24-40

Global Chaucers (with Candace Barrington). Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture, ed. Gail Ashton (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 147-156; reissued in paperback, 2017

by Jonathan Hsy and Candace Barrington

Translation Failure: The TARDIS, Cross-Temporal Language Contact, and Medieval Travel Narrative. In The Language of Doctor Who: From Shakespeare to Alien Tongues, eds. Jason Barr and Camille D.G. Mustachio (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), pp. 109-123

Voice Change/Language Change (with Chris Piuma). Burn After Reading: Vol. 2: The Future We Want: A Collaboration, eds. Jeffrey Cohen, Eileen Joy, and Myra Seaman (Brooklyn, NY: punctum books / Washington, DC: Oliphaunt Books, 2014), pp. 177-188

City. A Handbook of Middle English Studies, ed. Marion Turner (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013)

Lingua Franca: Overseas Travel and Language Contact in The Book of Margery Kempe. In The Sea and Englishness in the Middle Ages: Maritime Narratives, Identity and Culture, ed. Sebastian I. Sobecki (Cambridge: Brewer, 2011), pp. 159-178

"Oure Occian": Littoral Language and the Constance Narratives of Chaucer and Boccaccio. Europe and Its Others: Essays on Interperception and Identity, eds. Paul Gifford and Tessa Hauswedell. Cultural Identity Studies 18 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 215-224

Translation, Suspended: Literary Code-Switching and Poetry of Sea Travel. The Medieval Translator/Traduire au Moyen Âge, Vol. 12: Lost in Translation? eds. Denis Renevey and Christiania Whitehead (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009), pp. 133-145

Codes and Languages. Middle English Travel: A Critical Anthology, eds. Anthony Bale and Sebastian Sobecki (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 44-49

Afterword: Prosthesis in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Prosthesis in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, eds. Chloe Porter, Katie L. Walter, and Margaret Healy (Routledge, 2018), pp. 165-168

London. Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain, eds. Sîan Echard and Robert Rouse (John Wiley & Sons, 2017)

Race and Medieval Studies: A Partial Bibliography (snapshot publication at postmedieval [December 2017])

by Jonathan Hsy and Julie Orlemanski

Snapshot of an ongoing crowdsourced bibliography on race and medieval studies, published open-acc... more

Comment from the field: Composing Disability: Diagnosis, Interrupted, George Washington University. Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 8.3 (2014)

In The Middle: A Medieval Studies Group Blog [with Mary Kate Hurley, Karl Steel, and Cord J. Whitaker]

Global Chaucers [with Candace Barrington]

Reorienting Disability [co-organized with Julie Orlemanski: Seminar for New Chaucer Society Congress in Reykjavik, Iceland, July 2014]

Remediated verse: Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee and Patience Agbabi’s ‘Unfinished Business’

by Jonathan Hsy and Candace Barrington

The pdf of the essay contains formatting errors NOT in the final, published version. Please refe... more The pdf of the essay contains formatting errors NOT in the final, published version. Please refer to the final, published version for quotations.
This essay obliquely recalls the mirroring structure of ‘Unfinished Business,’ Patience Agbabi’s engagement with Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee in her one-round poetry slam, Telling Tales (Cannongate 2014). Our essay is organized by keywords common to both poems. Each section devotes a paragraph or two to Chaucer’s Melibee and then turns to Agbabi’s ‘Unfinished Business.’ By repeating essential keywords at the beginning and ending of each section (or linking a keyword at the end of one section to the beginning of another) our analysis suggests the recursive chain inherent in the poem’s mirroring structure, as well as in the poem’s reformulation of Chaucer’s prose tale.

Global Chaucers: Reflections on Collaboration and Digital Futures

by Candace Barrington and Jonathan Hsy

Global Chaucers, our multi-national, multi-lingual, multi-year project, intends to locate, catalo... more Global Chaucers, our multi-national, multi-lingual, multi-year project, intends to locate, catalog, translate, archive, and analyze non-Anglophone appropriations and translations of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Since its founding in 2012, this project has rapidly changed in response to scholars’ diverse interests and our expanding discoveries. Almost all these changes were prompted and made possible by our online presence (including a blog and Facebook group), and digital media comprises our primary means for gathering information, disseminating our findings, advertising conferences and events, and promoting the resource to other scholars. Because digital media can help disparate people traverse geographical and linguistic barriers, Global Chaucers has been able to exceed its initial intent to create an archive by developing a network of scholars, translators, and students seeking to engage in manifold ways with non-Anglophone reworkings of Chaucerian material from around the world. Reflecting on our project undertakings to date, this discussion presents some of the practical challenges we face and future directions our efforts might take, and we hope this discussion will help serve others who seek to launch group endeavors that traverse academic and nonacademic communities.

Global Chaucers

by Candace Barrington and Jonathan Hsy

Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture, ed. Gail Ashton, 2015

The cultural prestige of English and increased pedagogical emphasis on global diversity have mean... more The cultural prestige of English and increased pedagogical emphasis on global diversity have meant Geoffrey Chaucer’s writing has appeared in numerous non-Anglophone languages, translated and reshaped to reflect vastly different cultures. Simultaneously, this worldwide exposure has produced a wave of appropriations by artists drawn to Chaucer’s polyvocality and explorations of travel and displacement. Collectively, these global Chaucers allow a deeper engagement with the Tales by initiating a conversation that illuminates both the Chaucerian originals and their global progeny.

Green and Hsy Disability Disease and a Global Middle Ages 2022 abstract

by Monica H Green and Jonathan Hsy

Teaching the Global Middle Ages, 2022

This essay considers ways to "teach globally" about questions of disability and disease in an int... more This essay considers ways to "teach globally" about questions of disability and disease in an interconnected and globalized Middle Ages. As an example of disease and disability, we focus on leprosy because it was widespread in the premodern Old World (eastern hemisphere) and Oceania. Though its presence in the pre-contact Americas remains to be confirmed, leprosy was certainly among the diseases brought to the Americas via what has been called the "Columbian Exchange". Leprosy is, in other words, a global disease, offering us a means to examine how different societies, in different cultural circumstances, reacted to a common physical condition.

Feel free to contact me via email if your library cannot provide a copy: [email protected].

Gower and theory: old books, new matters

How We Read: Tales, Fury, Nothing, Sound

I am still working, right now, to try to get it back. One thing that has helped me to do so is re... more I am still working, right now, to try to get it back. One thing that has helped me to do so is remembering what it was to read slowly. These remembered experiences include the time of learning, both in college and in grad school, how to practice close reading (both times with a focus on seventeenth-century English poetry and prose), as well as older, more primal experiences of reading. In particular, I have been remembering what it was like to read as a very young child, including both my own memory of learning to read, and my memories of teaching children in my family to read. I tell some of these stories below, in my essay "Reading Out Loud." Healing memories in themselves, they might also be stories that are good for sharing, and good reading: a desire to read more, to read widely, to read more than was required -a desire to keep reading even after the course was over. Over the next few years, I taught the class in slightly different ways, changing up the books. Homer's Iliad, Plato's Symposium, and the Thousand and One Nights were constants, but other books came and went -Augustine's Confessions, Goethe's Faust. But one thing stayed the same, and that was the remarkable power of the lecture, at certain moments, to create a sense of excitement in the room. This did not happen every time, of course; but when it did, the room was electric. I started to want to find a way to do for casual readers something like what I had found I could do for the students in the Literary Tradition class, to build up a sense of excitement and a desire to read. Because I had already been writing headnotes to some of the same literary works, as part of my work as a volume editor for the Norton Anthology of World Literature, I thought that the obvious solution was a volume of essays. I thought I would call it "Dante's Friends," riffing off a striking moment that happens early in Dante's Inferno, where Dante (the character) enters Limbo and meets a whole range of poets, philosophers, and rulers from the ancient world. Dante is delighted when those ancient writers -Homer, Plato, and Ovid among them -welcome him among their number, calling him "poet." These essays, I thought, would be a way to bring out the conversations that happen across books over time, a conversation that Dante imaginatively brings to life in the account of Limbo in his Inferno. I didn't want the essays to be lectures in written format. I wanted them to excite and engage the reader, and figured out that the way to do this was to foreground my own emotional response to these books, doing in writing what

Trade and Romance by Michael Murrin

Arthuriana, 2015

Antiracist Medievalisms: From “Yellow Peril” to Black Lives Matter

Universal Design and Its Discontents

This collaborative essay offers two perspectives on disability and universalism in the fields of ... more This collaborative essay offers two perspectives on disability and universalism in the fields of Digital Humanities (DH) and Universal Design (UD). One of the authors, Richard H. Godden, considers how a particular experience of disability shapes his use of media and also informs his reactions to proscriptive state-ments about the use of technology; the other author, Jonathan Hsy, writes as a nondisabled ally who considers some of the dis-cursive and practical complications that arise in efforts to make the web more accessible to people with disabilities. While we each come from different perspectives, both of us seek to inter-rogate what it exactly means for a community to establish a set of "best practices" for the use of technology, and we both reveal how even the most well-intentioned universalist discourses can risk effacing crucial particularities of embodied experience.

<i>Artisans and Narrative Craft in Late Medieval England</i> (review)

Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 2012

13.05.01, Coley, The Wheel of Language

The Medieval Review, May 1, 2013

14.04.09, Johnson, Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages

The Medieval Review, Apr 1, 2014

Cambridge University Press eBooks, May 19, 2015

Watery Metaphor

Punctum Books, Sep 18, 2015

Voice Change/Language Change

Punctum Books, Apr 28, 2014

Languages are slippery, and they don't like being con-tained.We have already broken the rules... more Languages are slippery, and they don't like being con-tained.We have already broken the rules. That was not one hun-dred words. That was far, far less than one hundred words. Each section, we agreed, should consist of one hundred words. That section could have easily been rewritten to con-sist of one hundred words. We have already broken the rules. But. But now I am reminding you all of the rules. And now, in this section, we are being mindful of the rules, the rules that we have created and that we are breaking. We are being mindful of how we are creating them and how we are breaking them

Venus’ Owne Clerk: Chaucer’s Debt to the Confessio Amantis. Costerus New Series, 167

Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Apr 1, 2009

the Foucauldian grounding that informs it. (Numerous other scholars are similarly misrepresented ... more the Foucauldian grounding that informs it. (Numerous other scholars are similarly misrepresented throughout, though these works are less crucial to Phillips’s project than Lochrie’s.) Phillips turns to the Wife of Bath, “the culmination of Chaucer’s experimentation with idle talk” (p. 71), and argues that this character shows the potential of gossip as a narrative device and highlights the gendered associations of gossip and women’s speech, “as if delivering a sermon on women’s idle talk” (p. 111), which is then developed separately in a subsequent chapter on Chaucer, “‘Sisteris in Schrift’: Gossip’s Confessional Kinship.” “The Gospel According to Gossips, or How Gossip Got Its Name,” the fourth chapter, examines representations of the original “gossips,” baptismal sponsors (nomenclature mentioned in the introduction), and considers the relationship between “the legitimate features and obligations of this orthodox practice” and “for the literary gossips who take their name” (p. 152), ending with a refrain by this point quite familiar: “The gossips’ talk, both fictional and historical, is anything but idle” (p. 202). A brief conclusion, “Troubling Talk,” returns to the demonic record-keeper Tutivillus, here in the morality play Mankind, and finds that “Like Tutivillus, gossip is both entertaining and easily overlooked” (p. 204)—the latter observation a segue to the book’s wrap-up, where the author decries the “scholarly obscurity” that has prevented readers from enjoying the kinds of insights set forth in the present study until now (p. 205). The main themes of each chapter are then recapitulated—e.g., “To take gossip seriously is to acknowledge that in the literature of late medieval England this transforming talk is anything but idle” (p. 208)—illustrative of the book’s pervasive banality and redundancy. The topic of gossip and its reciprocal impact in late medieval English culture is interesting and current, but this book feels embryonic and incomplete. This is unfortunate because, one senses, with more assertive editing and more focused development of both methodology and application, this could have been a vastly more original and productive contribution to medieval literary and cultural studies. Nevertheless, Phillips’s book is a useful and welcome addition to explorations of late medieval gossip, offering preliminary and promising discussions of both familiar and lesser-known texts. Readers will doubtless find topics and avenues for further, and more focused, pursuit, and this book will thus likely appeal to students, teachers, and scholars of late medieval English literature and culture. Catherine S. Cox University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown

The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain, Aug 3, 2017

Lingua Franca: Overseas Travel and Language Contact in The Book of Margery Kempe

Chaucer's Brown Faces: Race, Interpretation, Adaptation

The Chaucer Review, 2021

Translation, Suspended: Literary Code-Switching and Poetry of Sea Travel

Brepols Publishers eBooks, 2009

... lish Working Papers, 6.1 (1997), 52-66; Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, ed. by Dav... more ... lish Working Papers, 6.1 (1997), 52-66; Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, ed. by David Andrew Trotter (Cambridge: DS Brewer, 2000); Laura Wright, Sources of ... or by love, or if she is referring to “the sea” as “bitter” or saying that “love” is “bitter”.&amp;#x27; &amp;#x27;Un nou-veau fragment du ...

Mobile language-networks and medieval travel writing

Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies, Jun 1, 2013

This article examines medieval portrayals of language contact across a range of texts, including ... more This article examines medieval portrayals of language contact across a range of texts, including travel narratives and plays depicting xenoglossia (speaking in tongues). Engaging with John Law's discussion of the mobile ship and Actor Network Theory (ANT), this essay conceives polyglot contact zones-spaces where languages come together and influence one another-as dynamic 'network objects.' Literary texts about travel employ innovative strategies for conveying the experience of transit over land and sea, and they encourage readers to imagine the subjective experience of moving through ever-shifting linguistic environments. In their intricate modes of representing life in transit, medieval texts invite multiple avenues for theorizing the 'network object' (such as a ship or a pilgrimage company) that is itself in perpetual motion.

Symptom and Surface: Disruptive Deafness and Medieval Medical Authority

Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, Aug 26, 2016

This essay examines constructions of deafness in medieval culture, exploring how deaf experience ... more This essay examines constructions of deafness in medieval culture, exploring how deaf experience disrupts authoritative discourses in three textual genres: medical treatise, literary fiction, and autobiographical writing. Medical manuals often present deafness as a physical defect, yet they also suggest how social conditions for deaf people can be transformed in lieu of treatment protocols. Fictional narratives tend to associate deafness with sin or social stigma, but they can also imagine deaf experience with a remarkable degree of sympathy and nuance. Autobiographical writing by deaf authors most vividly challenges diagnostic models of disability, exploring generative forms of perception that deafness can foster. In tracing the disruptive force that deaf experience exerts on perceived notions of textual authority, this essay reveals how medieval culture critiqued the diagnostic power of medical practitioners. Deafness does not simply function as a symptom of an individual problem or a metaphor for a spiritual or social condition; rather, deafness is a transformative capacity affording new modes of knowing self and other.

Diverging Forms

Cambridge University Press eBooks, May 16, 2018