Elizabeth Allen is Professor of English at UCI. Her most recent book is
. She is interested in medieval narrative genres from saints’ lives to romance; the dynamics of episodic narrative; sacred and secular uses of physical space; narrative and lyric; temporality in narrative; connections among classical, medieval, renaissance and later retellings; exemplarity in narrative. She has published a book on exemplarity (False Fables and Exemplary Truth, Palgrave 2005) and assorted essays on Chaucer, Gower, Patience, and episodic romance.Rebecca Davis is Associate Professor of English at UCI. She is completing a book titled Graceful Narratives, which explores how the theological idea of grace influenced literary form, specifically, narrative forms that are non-linear or suspend time, opening up possibilities for change and new narrative directions. Her first book, Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature (Oxford, 2016), examines the representation of creativity, nature, and ethics in William Langland’s Middle English poem. Her research interests include representations of thought and interiority in medieval allegory, drama, and dream vision; form, especially the mechanics of motion and plastic or porous forms; the phenomenology of fiction; representations of body and soul; and medieval notions of freedom, vulnerability, and liberality.
Ben Garceau is a lecturer in UCI’s Humanities Core program. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and English from Indiana University. His research explores early medieval translation and politics with a focus on Anglo-Saxon England.
Rebeca Helfer is Associate Professor of English at UCI, is currently working on a book project, tentatively entitled “Recollecting the Renaissance: The Art of Memory as Literary Theory and Practice,” which explores the significance of the art of memory – variously called mnemonics, artificial memory, locational memory, and so on – to early modern literature and literary theory, conceived in broad and interdisciplinary ways that connect with classical and medieval approaches to memory. This project builds upon her first book, Spenser’s Ruins and the Art of Recollection (University of Toronto, 2012), which examines the importance of the art of memory to Spenser’s poetics throughout his career. Her areas of interest include poetics and literary theory, memory and cognition, space and time, as well as disciplinary border-crossing or “the sister arts.”
Becky King is a lecturer in the UCI English Department’s Composition Program. She holds a PhD in English from UCLA. Her dissertation, Reaching Readers: Textual Engagement and Personalized Learning in the Works of Christine de Pizan and Geoffrey Chaucer, explores the strategies that Christine de Pizan and Geoffrey Chaucer used to foster learning and engagement amongst their readers in response to the expansion of vernacular literacy in the later Middle Ages. Her areas of interest include medieval depictions of reading (especially readers’ personal responses to literature) as well as medieval ideas of gender, affect, and emotion.
Jayne Lewis is Professor of English at UCI. She is the author of The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture: 1650-1740 (Cambridge, 1995); Mary Queen of Scots, Romance and Nation (Routledge 2000), and Air’s Appearance: Literary Atmosphere in British Fiction, 1660-1794 (Chicago, 2012) as well as numerous articles on 18th-century literature and culture. She has also coedited two essay volumes on John Dryden (who ended his poetic career modernizing Chaucer). Besides completing Enlightened Christianities, an anthology of English Christian writing between 1650 and 1750, she currently works on middle modern conceptions of the human aura as it was formulated in 18th-century medicine, spiritual practice, and aesthetics. Much of her work has centered on reception and on the persistence of archaic conceptions of embodied life in modernity. An ongoing strong research interest in gothic romance engages Enlightenment encounters with modes of enchantment that were, in the period, troped as medieval.
Ricardo Matthews is a lecturer in the English Department at UCI. He is currently writing on the medieval genre of the prosimetrum and its all verse variation. His dissertation explores the way highly conventional medieval poems suddenly take on an individual voice when framed by stories about singers. His research interests include medieval and contemporary poetics, historic rhetoric and the literary culture shared by both England and France, fifteenth century poetry and Charles of Orleans. He holds a PhD from UCI’s English Department and a master’s in French literature from LSU.
Hugh Roberts is Associate Professor of English at UCI. He is the author of Shelley and the Chaos of History, a study of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s fascination with historical indeterminacy and the role of poetry in political action. His interest in the Devysings research group stems from his broader interest in Romantic medievalism as well as his abiding interest in literary form and theories of poetics.