Faculty


Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Oklahoma
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	Faculty
The Variorum Chaucer OU History of Science The Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies OU English Department University of Oklahoma	David Anderson Assistant Professor Ph.D. McGill University, 2009 Joined OU English Faculty in 2009 David K. Anderson’s work focuses on the poetry and drama of the English Renaissance, and on the relationship between literature and religion. He is particularly interested in William Shakespeare, John Milton, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, John Foxe, and George Herbert, as well as Reformation history and the work of René Girard. He is currently working on a book-length study about how the cultural crisis surrounding religious violence is reflected in the tragedy of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Anderson is also interested in Milton’s relationship to the Protestant Reformation and the idea of a national church, as well as how English poets of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries responded to the continental wars of religion. He has published an article on John Donne’s poetry in Renaissance and Reformation, and has an article on King Lear and sacrificial violence forthcoming from English Literary History. A native of Ontario, Canada, Anderson has a B.A. (Hon.) from Queen’s University (Kingston), an M.A. from Dalhousie University (Halifax), and a Ph.D. from McGill University (Montreal). He has previously taught courses at McGill, Trinity College (at the University of Toronto), and Ryerson University. Joyce Coleman Rudolph C. Bambas Professor of Medieval English Literature and Culture Ph.D. University of Edinburgh, 1993 Joined OU English Faculty in 2005 Professor Coleman's website Professor Coleman's interest in the importance of performance and audience reception for our understanding of medieval literature was fired by the unexpected convergence of a B.A. in Medieval Studies (Barnard College) and an M.A. in Anthropology/Folkore (University of Texas at Austin). She pursued this interest via a Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh, published in 1996 as Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge University Press, 1996; paperback edition, 2005). In Spring 2006 she and her graduate class on "Medieval Authorship" took the idea to a new level, by creating a short film based on a scene of public reading in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. Professor Coleman has published articles on medieval literary reception, performance, and patronage in anthologies and in journals such as Speculum, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Philological Quarterly, Cahiers de Littérature Orale, and The British Library Journal. Her next major project is a survey of medieval "book-iconography," i.e., of manuscript illuminations that depict the writing, presenting, and reading of books. She will spend the academic year 2011-12 working on this book as a Visiting Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge. Professor Coleman teaches classes on Anglo-Saxon to late medieval literature as well as on modern uses of medieval material, such as "medieval films" and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. Kenneth Hodges Associate Professor Ph.D. University of Michigan Joined OU English Faculty in 2005 Professor Hodges' website Kenneth Hodges has broad interests, but his research focuses mainly on late medieval and early modern chivalry. His book Forging Chivalric Communities in Malory’s "Morte Darthur" came out from Palgrave in 2005. He has published articles in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Arthuriana, Fifteenth-Century Studies, and Genre. He received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Michigan, his M.A. in mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley, and his B.A. summa cum laude in English and physics from Williams College. Su Fang Ng Assistant Professor Ph.D. University of Michigan, 2001 Joined OU English Faculty in 2001 Professor Ng's website Professor Ng specializes in early modern literature with a secondary interest in postcolonial literatures. Her book, Literature and the Politics of Family in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, 2007, paperback 2009), examines how the putatively conservative analogy between state and family was used for radical political ends. She has published essays in three fields. Her early modern articles include essays on Aemilia Lanyer and early Stuart court patronage, Quaker women, Alexander the Great and Southeast Asia, Milton’s Satan, and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in ELH, The Seventeenth Century, Comparative Literature, Milton Studies, and a forthcoming edited collection on early modern England and Islamic worlds. She has published on postcolonial African and Southeast Asian nationalisms in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and in an edited collection on postcolonial women writers. Her medieval work includes articles on the late medieval Bible translations of the Wycliffites and Tyndale in Studies in Philology and on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Islamic St. George in Studies in the Age of Chaucer (co-authored with Kenneth Hodges). She also has a comparative essay bringing together early modern English and Malay literature (comparing Dryden and the 17^th-century Makassarese poet Amin) forthcoming from Modern Philology. Professor Ng has won a number of short- and long-term fellowships. She has been on year-long residential fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, and at the University of Texas at Austin on the Harrington Faculty Fellows program. Other awards include NEH Summer Institutes fellowships, Oklahoma Humanities Council research grants, the Newberry Library Short-Term Fellowship, the American Philosophical Society and British Academy Joint Fellowship for Research in London, a Taalunie grant for language study in Zeist, Netherlands, and most recently an affiliated fellowship at the International Institute for Asian Studies at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Bringing together interests in early modern England and in colonialism/ postcolonialism, her second book project, Global Renaissance: Early Modern Classicism and Empire from the British Isles to the Malay Archipelago, explores how Greek and Roman models of empire became part of native histories of the early modern maritime kingdoms of England and in Southeast Asia. She teaches courses in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British literature, early modern travel literature, early modern women writers, Shakespeare, Milton, and postcolonial literature. Daniel Ransom Associate Professor Ph.D. Cornell University Joined OU English Faculty in 1988 Professor Ransom is the author of Poets at Play: Irony and Parody in the Harley Lyrics (Pilgrim, 1985). He has contributed the textual commentary and notes to the Variorum edition of The General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales (University of Oklahoma Press, 1993). He has published articles on Dante in Dante Studies; on Middle English lyric in Studies in Philology; on Old Provençal lyric in Magister Regis (Fordham University Press), and on Chaucer in the Chaucer Review and other venues. He is currently co-editing The Chaucer Encyclopedia and preparing the Variorum edition of The Parson's Tale. Professor Ransom teaches courses in the history of English, medieval literature, and Chaucer. In his graduate seminars he focuses on the techniques of textual analysis and editing. James Y. Yoch Professor Ph.D. Princeton University, 1966 Joined OU English Faculty in 1964 Professor Yoch's research interests include Shakespeare, Italian Renaissance drama, movies 1930-1942, and connections between literature and landscape. His articles have appeared in Studies in Philology (luminous palaces in Stuart masques), Forum Italicum (Tasso's Aminta and the gardens of Ferrara), and Architectural Digest (landscaped sets in movies including Gone with the Wind). His essays on Renaissance tragicomedy and The Faithful Shepherdess appeared in Genre and Politics, on the staging of Italian pastorals in Elizabethan Theatre, and on Shakespeare's pastorals in Shakespeare and Pageantry. With Eugene Enrico, he has produced an hour-long video with Emma Kirkby starring as Isabella d'Este, First Lady of the Renaissance. From an ongoing interest in American studies, he has published The Gardens and Film Sets of Florence Yoch, 1890-1972 and the Guide to Villa Philbrook and Its Gardens. His forthcoming Dreamer on the Golden Shore: Phineas Banning in California 1851-1885 explores Greek Revival style, romantic literature and rhetoric, and American entrepreneurship by developing themes begun in his class on "Rural Pleasures: the Ideal of the Countryside in Art and Literature." Professor Yoch's teaching interests focus on students as active participants, and he encourages them to perform plays, compose TV and film scripts based on canonical literature, and create cartoon series and paintings in response to readings. He teaches undergraduate classes in Shakespeare, the classical and continental backgrounds of the Renaissance, and drama. His graduate seminars have studied the Masque; Shakespeare: Performance Theory, Film, and Computers; and Neoclassicism in the Renaissance English Stage.