I am a traditionally-trained, philologically-oriented medievalist with degrees from Toronto and Cambridge, and have published articles on the post-Chaucerian poet Thomas Hoccleve and on Middle Scots literature, the latter being a central concern of my dissertation. However, to my surprise I have become a compulsive Langland scholar over the past five years, largely the result of having to think laterally about it while teaching it to undergraduates (to enthusiastic response, for which I thank them). This has led to a series of articles on Langland and Wittgenstein and the role of logic in Piers Plowman; then to the development of a “wearable poem” in virtual reality called the Salvation Suit, an immersive translation of Langland’s full text, a project that looks like being as complicated and endless as the poem itself; and finally to a growing interest in embodied cognition in many forms, both scholarly and performative. I am also a creative writer and my speculative fiction novel The Stone Boatmen will be out with Aqueduct Press in 2012, followed by a short fiction collection, NoFood. I’m a longtime poet and am now working on combining poetic improvisation with the movement form known as contact improvisation, studying with the K-W contacter Tanya Williams, who has been a guest artist at the Critical Media Lab.

Selected Publications

Guest Editor, with Randy Harris, of Metaphor and Symbol, Special number on Cognitive Allegory (in press,forthcoming April 2011).

“The Book of the World as I Found It: Langland’s Piers Plowman and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 20.4 (2008).

“Langland, Wittgenstein and the Language Game,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 22 (2008).

"The Professional: Thomas Hoccleve,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 29 (2007): 341-73.

"Sacrilege, Sacrifice and John Barbour’s Bruce,” International Review of Scottish Studies 32 (2007): 7-32.

"Langland, Wittgenstein and the End of Language,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 20 (2006): 115-39.

"The Priue Scilence of Thomas Hoccleve,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000): 281-309.

Fellowships & Awards

2010-11. SSHRCC Research-Creation Grant, The Salvation Suit, 4A

2009-10. SSHRCC Research-Development Grant, The Salvation Suit, 4A

2010-11 and 09-10. UW Office of Research 4A Grants

2008. Grain Prize, Dramatic Monologue

2007. UW Travel Grant

1995-9. SSHRCC Doctoral Fellowship

1998. English Department Graduate Scholarship, Cambridge

Current Research

I am writing a series of articles on Thomas Hoccleve, fifteenth-century follower of Chaucer, and the ways in which he configured his career as a vernacular poet, the latest of which was published in SAC in 2007. Keeping up with longtime interests in Middle Scots, I am likewise examining in the emergent poetic profession as a topic in the work of Robert Henryson. However, teaching Langland over the last several years has made me increasingly fascinated with Piers Plowman and my main ongoing research project is a book length study tentatively titled Langland and the Philosophy of Language, prefatory work for which has recently appeared in YLS and Exemplaria.

Areas of Graduate Supervision

Middle English literature and historiography

Middle Scots literature and historiography

Premodern theory of mind and embodiment

Creative writing

Cognitive poetics