My usual courses are in medieval literature, the English language, and the Bible. Since 2002, when I started a Latin program that is now part of the new Classics Minor, I have also taught Latin. Through grants from the Keck and Hewlett foundations as well as from Ithaca College, I have promoted the use of technology in humanities teaching.

"Literary Scholars as Sleuths," IC View 26.4 (2008), tells the story of twin discoveries by a former student, Steve Hartman (English '87), and me.  In the Swedish National Library, Stockholm, Steve, now a professor in Sweden, found a letter by Henry David Thoreau that was believed to be lost.  In a manuscript in the British Library, London, I found a previously unknown letter written in the voice of Morgan le Fay, Arthurian legend's fairy queen.  My article about this discovery was published in 2008.

One of my current interests is early English pronunciation.  You can hear me reading passages from Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur in a reconstructed 15th-century London pronunciation on the CD "Malory Aloud: A Dramatic Reading of Excerpts from Le Morte Darthur," produced by the Chaucer Studio. My essay about these readings, “The Voice of Aurality in the Morte Darthur” won the James Randall Leader Prize for Outstanding Essay in Arthuriana, 2003, from the International Arthurian Society, North American Branch.  

At the moment I am on the editorial boards of the journals Literature Compass (Oxford) and Arthurian Literature (Cambridge), and I am starting the first year of a three-year term as the English literature representative on the executive board of the International Arthurian Society, North American Branch.

My career at Ithaca College began in 1980. From 1995 to 2002, and again in Fall 2006, I was department chair. During sabbaticals I have taught at the University of Maryland's Munich Campus (1988-89) and at the University of Dresden (1996-97), the latter courtesy of a Fulbright senior lectureship. In September 2002 I returned to Dresden to teach a one-week graduate seminar on medieval literature and critical theory. Elsewhere in Europe and in North America I have given over fifty lectures at various universities and conferences.

Public Web site

Travels With Sir Gawain

Current research projects

I am part of an international team based in Germany and Belgium that is producing an edition of the French and Latin versions of the medieval encyclopedia De proprietatibus rerum by Bartholomaeus Anglicus, which is often referred to as "Shakespeare's encyclopedia." In summer 2003 I was assisted by Jason Daniel, a senior with a grant from the Emerson Foundation that supported his research on this project.  The first volume of the edition appeared in April, 2007.

Some recent publications

"'Morgan le Fay, Empress of the Wilderness': A Newly Recovered Arthurian Text in London, BL Royal 12.c.ix," Arthurian Literature 25 (2008), 67-91.  (A favorable review of this volume of AL appeared in the Times Literary Supplement (London), no. 5509, October 31, 2008, pp. 26-7.)

“Encyclopedias,” in Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. II: 1100-1400, ed. Nigel Morgan and Rodney M. Thomson (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 244-49.  (A favorable review of the book as a whole appeared in the Times Literary Supplement (London), no. 5507, October 17, 2008, p. 32.)

Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum, Vol. I:  Introduction, Prologue, et Livres I-IV, ed. B. van den Abeele, H. Meyer, M. W. Twomey, B. Roling, and R. J. Long, De Diversis Artibus 78 (NS 41) (Turnhout, Belgium:  Brepols, 2007).

"Middle English Translations of Medieval Encyclopedias," Literature Compass 3/3 (2006), 331-40.

"Reading Chaucer's Latin Aloud," in 'Seyd in forme and reverence: Essays in Memory of Emerson Brown, Jr., ed. T. L. Burton and John F. Plummer (Adelaide, Australia / Provo, Utah: Chaucer Studio Press, 2005), pp. 181-90.

"The Gawain-Poet," in Readings in Medieval Texts: Interpreting Old and Middle English Literature, ed. David F. Johnson and Elaine Treharne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 273-87.

Reviews for Speculum: Journal of the Medieval Academy of America; Journal of Medieval Latin; Anglia: Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie, and other journals.