Stanford University Department of English

Three new instructors join the English Department this year. Check out their new courses!

 

Elaine Treharne’s research and teaching focuses on Early English manuscripts and texts from c. 700 to 1500 and on Text Technologies from the earliest times to the present day. She is particularly interested in the materiality of the manuscript book, its tactile nature, and the multiple layers that make up the codex (its 'architexuality'). Current projects include The Phenomenal Book, analysing the interactions between manuscripts and their users, manuscripts’ digital reproduction and the theoretical implications of touch and the 'voluminous'; Beauty and the Book: Arts and Crafts to Modernism, 1890-1940, which will examine the phenomenology of the book in the work of Elbert Hubbard, Eric Gill, Edward Johnston, Philip Lee Warner and David Jones; the Oxford Very Short Introduction to Medieval Literature (OUP, 2013); and the new four-volume Encyclopaedia of Book History: Manuscript, Print and Digital Technologies for Wiley-Blackwell (2014).

 

Treharne has written or edited some two-dozen books: most recently, she has published Living Through Conquest: The Politics of Early English, 1020-1220 (OUP, 2012); the ebook (with her co-directors on an AHRC project), The Production and Use of English Manuscripts, 1060 to 1220 (https://www.le.ac.uk/ee/em1060to1220/index.htm); and, with Greg Walker, the Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature (OUP, 2010). Treharne and Walker are also the General Editors of the OUP series Oxford Textual Perspectives. Treharne is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and, in 2011, was the Ida Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Iowa. She has been awarded a number of grants and honors, including an American Philosophical Society Franklin Fellowship and a Princeton Procter Fellowship. She is a Trustee, and former Chair and President, of the English Association (www.le.ac.uk/engassoc), for whom she is also General Editor of Essays and Studies. She is the Medieval Editor forReview of English Studies, Early Medieval Editor for Blackwell's Literature Compass, Medieval Editor for theYear’s Work in English Studies, and for Oxford Bibliographies Online British and Irish Literature. She serves on numerous Advisory Boards for journals and as a consultant for various international palaeographical and digitization projects.

 

2012-13 Courses: 

 

2012-13 Courses:

 

Adena Spingarn holds a Mellon Fellowship and teaches in the English department in 2012-14. She is currently at work on a book project, “Uncle Tom in the American Imagination,” which examines Uncle Tom’s transformation in American cultural understanding from a heroic Christ figure in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to a submissive race traitor. A contributor toTheatre Survey, Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the National Era, The Root, and Vogue, her current writing and teaching focus on 19th- and 20th-century American literature and cultural history, with a special emphasis on African American literature and literary history.

 

2012-13 Courses: