Position
Academic Background
Sample Courses   
Teaching Philosophy
Research & Interests    
Notable Academic Appointments & Awards
Publication Highlights    
            Selected Scholarly Presentations              

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Position

• Professor of English

Academic Background        

• Brown University - Ph.D. English Literature, 1962
• Brown University -  M.A. English Literature, 1955
• Providence College - B.A. English, 1953

Sample Courses Taught at Providence College

• Chaucer
• Liberal Arts Honors Colloquium: The Literature of Spiritual Crisis
• Liberal Arts Honors Western Civilization
• Survey of British Literature

Teaching Philosophy

The best, and most succinct, pedagogical advice I know comes from Geoffrey Chaucer, who in his Canterbury Tales describes the Clerk of Oxford thus: "Gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche." 
The three operative words in that Middle English sentence from six hundred years ago are "gladly, "learn," and "teach." What Chaucer meant was that without gladness - without joy - one can expect from the educative process only a little learning (which another poet, Alexander Pope, dubbed "a dangerous thing"). So, without first having experienced the joy of learning, the teacher cannot reduplicate that state of academic grace for his or her own students. The trick is to generate gladness and then sustain it. You will know when it happens. And by the pall of drudgery that envelops your classroom, you will also know when it doesn't.

The major attention of my scholarship has been devoted to the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer. Of the forty articles I have published in learned journals over the years, twenty-six have focused on Chaucer, the most recent on the relationship between late medieval nominalism and the shape of his poetry. But I have also shopped in other markets, especially in the last three years when I wrote four articles for the journal, First Things, on topics as diverse as Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Jane Austen, and David Hume. I might mention that my interest in these figures emanated from my teaching duties in Honors Western Civilization courses.

My major non-scholarly concern since 1987 has been administering the Liberal Arts Honors Program, which I left recently after seventeen years at the helm. A substantial portion of the gladness I describe above comes from having taught the best and the brightest in a variety of Honors courses over the years.

• Director, Liberal Arts Honors Program, 1987 - 2004
• President's Distinguished Faculty Award, 1999
• Chairman, Rhodes Scholarship Nominating Committee for Rhode Island, 1998 -- 2002
• Sears Roebuck Award for Excellence in Teaching, 1990
• Visiting Associate Professor, Brown University, 1983
  

Publication Highlights

• “First Impressions in Hume and Austen,” First Things #134 (June/July, 2003)
• “Putting off the Old Man and Putting on the New: Ephesians 4:22-24 in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Swift, and Dostoevsky,” Christianity and Literature 51 (2002).
• “Flaubert and the Sin Against the Holy Ghost,” First Things #121 (March, 2002)
• “The Mill in the Reeve’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 36 (2002)
• “Nominalism and Typology in Chaucer” in Typology and English Medieval Literature, ed. Hugh T. Keenan (New York: AMS Press, 1992)
• “Penance and Poetry in The Canterbury Tales,” PMLA 93 (1978).
• “Christian Affirmation in The Book of the Duchess,” PMLA  84 (1969)
• The Epic Voice (Mouton: The Hague, Paris, 1967)

• Keynote Address: National Society of Collegiate Scholars, 2001
• Valedictory Presidential Address: Humanities Forum of Rhode Island, 1995
• “Chaucer and Pedagogy,” a paper delivered to the New Chaucer Society at Trinity College, Dublin, 1994
• “Chaucer and the Problem of the Universal,” a paper delivered to the Chaucer group of the Northeast Modern Language Association, State University of New York (SUNY) at Albany, 1983
• “Penance and Poetry in the Canterbury Tales,” a paper delivered to the annual Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention in San Francisco, 1977
• “The Artistry of the Pardoner’s Tale,” a paper delivered to the Association of Swiss Professors of English at its annual convention in Biel, Switzerland, 1970

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