Professor and Chair, English
School of Humanities

Sanctuary; romance; Chaucer, Gower, Gawain-Poet; exemplary literature, chronicle, episodic form; intersections between ethics and politics, politics and religion; hospitality, sovereignty, legal history of England

I work on a range of medieval English literature and law. My book Uncertain Refuge: Sanctuary in the Literature of Medieval England (U Penn, 2021) explores narratives of refuge in churches, caves, forests, hidey-holes and ruins. I seek conjunctions of medieval law and history with saints' lives, Robin Hood ballads, romances of Gawain, and drama; and across time and culture, from the Underground Railroad and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s to the asylum movement of the 1980s and the sanctuary movement of today. I am working on a new project on medieval romance and law tentatively titled Forms of Mitigation.

I have also published a book on exemplarity (False Fables and Exemplary Truth, Palgrave 2005) and assorted essays on Chaucer, the Gawain-poet, and medieval romance, among other topics. I am interested in stories--how they are formed from tradition and innovation, who tells them and how they are told, what moral and political purposes they serve, how they reflect and influence history. I write about narratives in history with particular interests in refuge, sacred space, time and temporality, cross-period resonances (periodization), and the moral lessons of narrative.

I teach Arthurian romance, the Bible as Literature, Chaucer, and other topics courses on medieval (and sometimes later) literature. I am currently Chair of the English Department.

Uncertain Refuge: Sanctuary in the Literature of Medieval England, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021
https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/16262.html

Language Matters: Middle English Studies in Honor of Karla Taylor, co-edited with Catherine Sanok, Boydell & Brewer, forthcoming March 2025.

False Fables and Exemplary Truth in Later Middle English Literature, Palgrave, 2005

“Literary History is a Ghost Story: The Awntyrs of Arthur and Romance Speculations,” for “Speculations,” a jubilee issue of Speculum, 2025.

“Introduction: Karla Taylor’s Philology,” in Language Matters: Middle English Studies in Honor of Karla Taylor, forthcoming Boydell & Brewer, March 2025.

“Tears of Survival: Myrrha and Criseyde,” for Language Matters: Middle English Studies in Honor of Karla Taylor, forthcoming Boydell & Brewer, March 2025.

“Emaré / Egaré: Sanctuary and Exile, Law and Romance.” Journal of Social Research. July 2024.

“Sanctuary and Refuge,” in The Routledge Companion to Global Chaucer, ed. Susie Nakeley and Craig Bertholet, Routledge, 2024.

“Introduction: Spaces and Times of Crisis,” Exemplaria 33:3, Spaces and Times of Crisis (special issue), co-authored with Gina Hurley and Mary Kate Hurley, October, 2022.

“Medieval Sanctuary, Gothic Entrapment, and the Fugitive Self in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad,” postmedieval 14:1, 2023.

“Ecology and the Gawain-Poet,” in Becoming the Pearl-poet: Perceptions, Connections, Receptions, ed. Jane Beal, Lexington Books; 2022.

“Death and Romance in Sir Orfeo,” in Narrating Death, eds. Daniel Jernigan and Walter Wadiak, Routledge, 2018.

“A Once and Future King: Sanctuary, Sovereignty, and the Politics of Pity in the Histories of Perkin Warbeck,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 47:2 (2017): 327-358.

“Teaching Pearl and Landscape,” Approaches to Teaching the Middle English Pearl, ed. Jane Beal and Mark Bradshaw Busbee, Modern Language Association of America, 2017.

“Sanctuary and Sovereignty: Hubert de Burgh in the Chronica Majora,” New Medieval Literatures 15 (2014 for 2013).

“Flowing Backward to the Source: Criseyde’s Promises and the Ethics of Allusion,” Speculum 88.3 (June 2013).

“ ‘As mote in at a munster dor’: Sanctuary and Love of This World,” Philological Quarterly 87 (2008): 105-133.

“Episodes,” Twenty-first Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 191-206.

"Newfangled Readers in Gower's Apollonius of Tyre," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 29 (2007), 419-64.

"Chaucer Answers Gower: Constance and the Trouble With Reading," English Literary History 63 (1997).

Magazine and newspaper articles

“Pandemic / Protest Teaching,” Oh! The Humanities, Thursday, July 23, 2020

“What’s the History of Sanctuary Spaces and Why Do They Matter?” The Conversation,
November 23, 2017

“How ‘Dreamers’ Are Ignored: Mockery of Justice,” The Globe Post, Sept. 6, 2017

“Pope Francis’s Call to House Refugees Echoes Church History,” The Conversation, September
23, 2015

“Why Sanctuary Cities Must Exist,” op-ed, Los Angeles Times, September 17, 2015.

Affiliated with UCI Early Cultures

Link to this profile
https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=4540

Last updated
01/23/2025