Department of English at the University of Virginia

Interests

My main historical interests concern the relationship between the literary and musical cultures of the European Middle Ages. My first book explored the understanding and aesthetic of medieval music as a practice of the flesh, and a current long-term project examines the role of liturgical cultures in the generation and proliferation of English vernacular writing from the period before the Norman Conquest through the early Reformation. I’m also quite interested in the important role played by medievalism in the shaping of modernity and modern critical thought. A recent book called The Premodern Condition looks at the influence of medieval studies on French theory of the postwar generation (Georges Bataille to Roland Barthes), while a short book forthcoming from Prickly Paradigm, Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror, takes on the discourse of the medieval in political rhetoric and wartime policy in the period since 9/11.

Books

• Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror. Prickly Paradigm/University of Chicago Press, 2007.
• The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory. University of Chicago Press, 2005.
• Co-editor (with Ethan Knapp), “The Marxist Premodern,” special issue of Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34 (Fall 2004).
• Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer. Stanford University Press, 2001.

Articles

• Empire, Apocalypse, and the 9/11 Premodern," forthcoming in Critical Inquiry (2008).
• “Liturgy.”  21st-Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English. Ed. Paul Strohm.  Oxford: Oxford University Press (2007).
• “The Parable of Caedmon’s Hymn: Liturgical Invention and Literary Tradition.”  Journal of English and Germanic Philology 106 (2007).
• “Lyric Inventions: The Short Poems,” in The Yale Companion to Chaucer, ed. Seth Lerer (2005).
• “Lollard Ekphrasis: Situated Aesthetics and Literary History,” in Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (2004).
• “Medieval Literature and Cultures of Performance,” in New Medieval Literatures (2003).
• “Medieval Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and the Genealogies of Critique,” in Speculum (2002).
• “Vernacular Legality: The English Jurisdictions of The Owl and the Nightingale,” in The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England, ed. Emily Steiner and Candace Barrington (Cornell, 2002).
• “Ovidian Homoerotics in Twelfth-Century Paris: The Letters of Leoninus, Poet and Polyphone,” in Gay and Lesbian Quarterly (2002), co-authored with David Townsend.
• “The Ovidian Verse‑Epistles of Master Leoninus,” in Journal of Medieval Latin (2000), co-authored with David Townsend.
• “Langland’s Musical Reader: Liturgy, Law, and the Constraints of Performance,” in Studies in the Age of Chaucer (1999).
• “The Vision of Music in a Lollard Florilegium: Cantus in the Middle English Rosarium Theologie ( Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College MS 354/581),” in Plainsong and Medieval Music (1999).
• “The Color of Salvation: Desire, Death, and the Second Crusade in Bernard of Clairvaux's Sermons on the Song of Songs,” in The Tongue of the Fathers: Gender and Ideology in Twelfth-Century Latin, ed. David Townsend and Andrew Taylor (Penn, 1998).
• “Sodomy and Resurrection: The Homoerotic Subject of the Divine Comedy,” in Premodern Sexualities, ed. Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero (Routledge, 1996).

Book Reviews

• Review of L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love: Historicism, Psychoanalysis, Chaucer (Minnesota, 2003), Studies in the Age of Chaucer 27 (2005).
• Review of Patricia Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Pennsylvania, 2001), MLQ 66 (2005): 119-24.
• Review of David Matthews, The Invention of Middle English: An Anthology of Primary Sources (Penn State, 2000), Speculum 77 (2002).
• Review of Barbara Newman, ed., Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World (California, 1998), Journal of Religion 81 (2001): 351-53.
• Review of J. Stephen Russell, Chaucer and the Trivium: The Mindsong of the Canterbury Tales (Florida, 1999), Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000): 531-34.

Honors

• John Nicholas Brown Prize from the Medieval Academy of America, 2005
• MLA Prize for a First Book, 2002
• Philip Brett Award from the American Musicological Society, 2001
• John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, 2004
• Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies, 2004-2005
• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 2000-2001
• Visiting Professor, Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, UCLA, Nov. 1999
• Javits Fellowship, 1993-1996