Curriculum Vitae

Select a category Education Employment Awards Scholarship Books Articles & Reviews Work in Progress Papers Presented and Upcoming Professional Activities Biography

Education

B.A. Stanford University
English and Classics (1973)

M.A., Ph.D. University of Virginia (1976)
English Language and Literature (1982)
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Employment

Lecturer, UCLA, Writing Programs (1982-1983)

Assistant & Associate Professor, Wellesley College (1983-1996)

Co-Director, Writing Program (1988-91, 1997-98), Co-Director, Medieval/Renaissance Studies Program (1995-96, 2005-06, Director, 2006-07)

Katharine Lee Bates and Sophie Chantal Hart Professor of English (2000-)

Chair, Wellesley English Dept. (1998-2001, 2007-10)
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Awards

NEH Fellowship for College Teachers (1987)

Pinanski Teaching Prize, Wellesley College (1996)

NEH Summer Fellowship (1997)

NEH Fellowship for College Teachers (2005-06)

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Scholarship

"The High Medieval Dream Vision: Poetry, Philosophy, and Literary Form" (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).

"Chaucer’s Philosophical Visions" (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000).

Editor, "Chaucer's Cultural Geography" (New York: Routledge, 2002).

Editor, "Dream Visions and Other Poems," by Geoffrey Chaucer (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007).

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“Homer’s Iliad and Pope’s Vile Forgery,” Comparative Literature 34 (1982): 1-15; reprinted in Homer, ed. Katherine Callen King, Classical Heritage Series, Vol. 5 (NY: Garland, 1994), pp. 87-102.

“Despoiling Griselda: Chaucer’s Walter and the Problem of Knowledge in the Clerk’s Tale,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer10 (1988): 41-70.

“The Book of the Duchess as a Philosophical Vision,” Genre 21 (1988): 279-305.

“‘What Hands Are Here?’ The Hand as Generative Symbol in Macbeth,” Review of English Studies 39 (1988): 29-38.

[Review] J. Stephen Russell, The English Dream Vision: Anatomy of a Form (Ohio State University Press, 1988), for JEGP, 88 (1989): 393-96.

"The Parliament of Fowls and Late Medieval Voluntarism, (Parts I & II)," The Chaucer Review, 25 (1990): 1-16, 85-95.

[Review] Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), for Envoi: A Review Journal of Medieval Literature, 2.1 (1990): pp. 136-42.

[Review] Judith M. Davidoff, Beginning Well: Framing Fictions in Late Middle English Poetry (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988), for Speculum, 65 (1990): 643-46.

[Review] Jon Whitman, Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique (Harvard University Press, 1987), for Speculum, 65 (1990): 1079-81.

[Review] Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (University of Chicago Press, 1989), for JEGP, 90 (1991): 418-20.

"Implementing an Interdisciplinary Course," in Approaches to Teaching the Arthurian Tradition, ed. Maureen Fries and Jeanie Watson (New York: Modern Language Assoc., 1992), pp. 65-69.

[Review] Elaine Tuttle Hansen's Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (University of California Press, 1992), for JEGP, 92 (1993): 429-31.

[Review] Muriel Whitaker, The Legends of King Arthur in Art, for Speculum, 68 (1993): 909-10.

"Partioned Fictions: The Meaning and Importance of Walls in Chaucer's Poetry," in Art and Context in Late Medieval English Narrative: Essays in Honor of Robert Worth Frank, Jr, ed. Robert R. Edwards (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), pp. 107-125.

[Review] Steven F. Kruger, Dreaming in the Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 1992) for Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 16 (1994): pp. 215-19.

"The Logic of the Dream Vision in Chaucer's House of Fame," in Literary Nominalism and the Theory of Rereading Late Medieval Texts: A New Research Paradigm, ed. Richard J. Utz, (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995), pp. 179-203.

"East Meets West in Chaucer's Squire's and Franklin's Tales," Speculum, 70 (1995): 530-51.

[Review] Sheila Delany, The Naked Text: Chaucer's Legend of Good Women (Berkeley & Los Angeles: Univ. of CA Press, 1994), for Chaucer Yearbook, 4 (1997): 99-104.

[Review] Edwin D. Craun, Lies, Slander, and Obscenity in Medieval English Literature: Pastoral Rhetoric and the Deviant Speaker (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998), for Speculum, 74 (1998): 398-400.

"Diana's 'Bowe Ybroke': Impotence, Desire, and Virginity in Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls," in Menacing Virgins: Representing Virginity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Marina Leslie (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), pp. 83-96.

"Baring Bottom: Shakespeare and the Chaucerian Dream Vision," in Reading Dreams: The Interpretation of Dreams from Chaucer to Shakespeare, ed. Peter Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 99-124.

“Storytelling, Exchange, and Constancy: East and West in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review, 33 (1999): 409-22.

“The Pardoner’s Digestion: Eating Images in the Canterbury Tales,” in Speaking Images: Essays in Honor of V. A. Kolve, ed. R.F. Yeager and Charlotte Morse (Asheville, NC: Pegasus Press, 2001), pp. 393-409.

[Review] Chaucer’s Dream Poetry ed. Helen Phillips and Nick Havely (London: Longman, 1997) for Speculum 76 (2001):410-12.

[Review] Iain MacLeod Higgins, Writing East: The "Travels" of Sir John Mandeville (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997) for Speculum 76 (2001): 469-71.

"An Immodest Proposal: Have Children in Graduate School," The Chronicle of Higher Education (June 7, 2002): B5.

"Team Teaching the Literature of the European and Islamic Middle Ages: The European Perspective," in Medieval Cultures in Contact, ed. Richard Gyug (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 213-22, 232-46.

[Review] Hugh White, Nature, Sex, and Goodness in a Medieval Literary Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press), for The Modern Language Review 98 (2003): 947-48.

[Review] Julia Boffey, ed., Fifteenth-Century English Dream Visions: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), for Notes and Queries 51 (Dec. 2004): 435-36.

"Voting One's Conscience: What It Means and What It Doesn't," Society 42 (May/June, 2005): 27-29.

[Review] Dana M. Symons, ed.. Chaucerian Dream Visions and Complaints (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2004), for The Medieval Review, http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?sid=eb7e8a5b27ffa5c89864e26d6a2a0c76;c=tmr;iel=4;view=toc;idno=baj9928.0505.002 [accessed 5/10/05].

"Laura Hibbard Loomis: Mrs. Arthur," in Women Medievalists in the Academy, ed. Jane Chance (Madison: University ofWisconsin Press, 2005), 239-54.

"The Three Noble Kinsmen," in Images of Matter: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Yvonne Bruce (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 72-91.

[Review] Joanna Summers, Late-Medieval Prison Writing and the Politics of Autobiography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), for Speculum 81 (2006): 608-09.

“From Tavern to Pie Shop: The Raw, the Cooked, and the Rotten in Fragment I of  Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,” Exemplaria (2006-07); preprint http://www.english.ufl.edu/exemplaria/SD/Lynch.htm [accessed May 31, 2006].

"Dating Chaucer," The Chaucer Review 42 (2007): 1-22.

[Review] Keiko Hamaguchi, Non-European Women in Chaucer: A Postcolonial Study (Frankfurt-am-Main: Peter Lang, 2006), for Speculum 83 (2008): 706-08.

[Review] Susan Schibanoff, Chaucer's Queer Poetics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), for Studies in the Age of Chaucer (forthcoming, 2008).

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"The Eaten Word: Food and Drink in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales" (book about the role of food in the structure of the Tales).

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"The Itinerary of the Dream-Vision,"Davis Medieval Texts and Studies, Conference on Twelfth-Century Genres, March 7, 1981.

"John Gower and the Dream-Vision Form," MLA Convention, Los Angeles, CA, Dec. 29, 1982.

"The Kingis Quair and Literary Parody," 19th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 7, 1984.

"The Book of the Duchess as a Philosophical Vision," 22nd International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 7, 1987.

"Teaching Chaucer's House of Fame in a Course on Visionary Literature," Medieval Association of the Midwest Conference at Cleveland State Univ., October 3, 1987.

"The Parliament of Fowls and Late Medieval Voluntarism," Harvard Doctoral Conference, Cambridge, MA, October 21, 1987.

"The Meaning and Importance of Chaucer's Walls," Harvard Doctoral Conference, April 26, 1990.

"The Logic of the Dream Vision in Chaucer's House of Fame," Seventh Citadel Conference on Medieval Literature, March 1, 1991, Charleston, SC; again in a longer version at the Harvard Doctoral Conference, March 21, 1991.

"East Meets West in the Squire's and Franklin's Tales," Harvard Doctoral Conference, Cambridge, MA, October 7, 1993.

"Diana's 'Bowe Ybroke': Impotence, Desire, and Virginity in Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls," 29th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 8, 1994; again in a longer version at the Harvard Doctoral Conference, Oct. 6, 1994.

"'Soun is Noght but Eyr Ybroken': Truth, Lies, and More Lies in the House of Fame," 20th Meeting of the Southeastern Medieval Association, Sept. 29, 1994.

"Storytelling Exchange, and Constancy: East and West in Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale," 31st International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 10, 1996.

"Chaucer's Philosophical Vision(s)," to the New Chaucer Society Congress, Los Angeles, California, July 27, 1996.

"Team Teaching the Literature of the European and Islamic Middle Ages: The European Perspective," conference on Medieval Cultures in Contact, Fordham University, New York City, March 22, 1997.

Organizer of session for New Chaucer Society Congress, "Virgins: Mythical, Material, and Metaphorical," Paris, France, July 19, 1998.

“The Virgin Wife of Bath,” to the New Chaucer Society Congress, Paris, France, July 19, 1998.

"Philosophical and Paradoxical Chaucer," to Harvard Doctoral Conference, March 9, 2000.

“Philosophical Chaucer,” to the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium, Sewanee, TN, March 31, 2000.

“’Vitaille at the beste’: Eating Well on Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrimage,” 27th Meeting of the Southeastern Medieval Association, New Orleans, LA, Oct. 20, 2001.

"Feast of Fables: Eating and Drinking in the Canterbury Tales," to Harvard Doctoral Conference, November 8, 2001; again at the University of Connecticut, March 15, 2002.

Participant in roundtable discussion of Nancy Drew on "The Connection," WBUR, June 4, 2002.

Organizer of session for New Chaucer Society Congress, "Shakespeares's Chaucer," Boulder, CO, July 19, 2002.

“Escape to the Middle Ages: Why Tolkien? Why Now?” for the annual conference of the Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association, October 31, 2003.

Organizer of session for New Chaucer Society Congress, “Inside Chaucer,” Glasgow, Scotland, July, 2004.

"From Tavern to Pie Shop: The Raw and the Rotten in Fragment 1 of the Canterbury Tales," to the annual conference of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, in Tempe, AZ, Feb. 19, 2005; expanded version to the Harvard Doctoral Conference, March 17, 2005.

Chair of session for the Harvard Conference on Conversion, September 25, 2005.

"Chaucer in the All-Woman Classroom: Emasculating the Father, Empowering the Mother," for the New Chaucer Society Congress, in New York, July 31, 2006.

Chair of  session for the Medieval Academy of America meeting, “Where the Secular Meets the Sacred II: Sanctuary and the Church,” in Boston, MA, March 31, 2006.

Chair of session on the Book of the Duchess, for the MLA Division on Chaucer, MLA Convention, Philadelphia, December 27, 2006.

“Dreaming in the Middle Ages,” at the College of the Holy Cross, Feb. 28, 2008; again as Wellesley College Reunion Lecture, June 6, 7, 2008.

Session Chair, Bloomfield Conference on "Cultural Reformations," Harvard
University, September 10-13, 2008 (of the session on "Monasticism," Sept. 13).

"Getting Medieval: What to Do About the Missing Millennium," Distinguished Faculty
Lecture, Wellesley College, October 3, 2008; again to Wellesley College Seattle
Alumnae Club, Nov. 14, 2008.

"Chaucer's Insatiable Wives: Women Eating Men and the End of Romance in the
Canterbury Tales," 44th International Congress on Medieval Studies, International Congress at Kalamazoo (session sponsored by York University Romance Research Group), 7-10 May 2009.

Panelist in roundtable session, "Post-Riverside Editions, E-Texts, and Digital
Resources," 44th International Congress on Medieval Studies, International
Congress at Kalamazoo (session sponsored by The Chaucer Review), 7-10 May 2009.

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Longstanding membership in the Medieval Academy of America, The Modern Language Association, the New Chaucer Society, the John Gower Society.

Member of Steering Committee, New England Medieval Conference, 1992-97.

Co-chair Program Committee for 1995 Medieval Academy Conference in Boston.

Councillor, Medieval Academy; 1993-96, Executive Committee, Medieval Academy, 1995-96.

Committee for Professional Development, Medieval Academy; travel grant reviewer (ACLS), 1997-2000.

NEH Selection Panel for Summer Stipends, 1998, 1999.

Selection Committee, John Nicholas Brown prize, Medieval Academy, 2001-04.

Outside Review Team, Dept. of English, University of San Francisco, September, 2001.

Outside Review Team-leader, English Department, Weston High School, Massachusetts, March and April, 2003.

Ms. Referee for Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Speculum, The Chaucer Review, PMLA, Penn State Univ. Press, University Press of Florida.

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