Post-Apocalyptic Canterbury Tales
by J J CohenI blogged about it two years ago, and now the Chaucerian apocalypse has arrived. The pilgrims are passengers on a nuclear-powered steam train, Canterbury is the new capital of England, a storm is raging and the waters are rising ...

Blogging the Middle Ages I: Early Days on the Electronic Frontier
by J J CohenExciting news: fingers crossed, it seems the Chaucer Blog will appear in print, via Bonnie Wheeler's always innovative New Middle Ages series. Fans of the blog know that beneath some excellent humor lurks serious material for scholarly thought. A cross-over success, the blog has well illustrated the powers of medievalism that scholars like Stephanie Trigg, Tom Prendergast, and David Matthews have been detailing -- as well as the inseparability of medieval studies from medievalism that has

From Inside HigerEd: U Presidents, Thesis Writing
by J J CohenTwo articles that make a great deal of sense. First, an argument that the best leader of a university valuing research is a successful researcher. That might seem obvious, but the connection often eludes search committees. Second, a helpful blog post by Peg Boyle Single about getting a dissertation done via writing as a daily practice. Although I realize I write too much, and clearly do not suffer from the hesitations perfectionism instills, the piece underscores some practices that have been essential to my ow

A Spooky Day to You: A Transvestite Monastic Zombie, a Singing Corpse, and other tales? of woe
by KARL STEELImportant conversations on what we do as literary critics continue below, but as today's Halloween, we ough

Some Other Kind of Relation That is Not Just Possible but Already at Work: Reading, Criticism, Inter
by EILEEN JOYA necessary task of theory is precisely to provoke a text into unpremeditated articulation, into the utterance of what it somehow contains or knows but neither intends nor is able to say.—Paul Strohm, Theory and the Premodern TextSome