George Edmondson

|Associate Professor
Academic Appointments

Associate Professor of English

I work at the intersection, dangerous at times but well policed, of medieval studies and critical theory. On the medieval-studies side of the street you will find a book, The Neighboring Text: Chaucer, Boccaccio, Henryson, its Choice Outstanding Academic Title award still proudly displayed in the window, alongside articles and chapters in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Exemplaria, New Medieval Literatures, and The Post-Historical Middle Ages. Venture down the critical-studies side of the street and you will run across a volume forthcoming from Duke University Press, Sovereignty in Ruins: A Politics of Crisis, coedited with Klaus Mladek. At present (or in perpetuity — it’s hard to say), I am at work on a few different projects: a book, coauthored with Klaus Mladek, titled A Politics of Melancholia, for which we received a collaborative fellowship from the ACLS; a long essay on Chaucerian humor; and a book project on the motif of exile and return in Middle English literature. I have also been known to wander down side streets and blind alleys in pursuit of my other interests, which include psychoanalysis, biopolitics, and the literature of walking.

Contact

Sanborn, Room 212
HB 6032

Education

  • B.A. University of California at Los Angeles
  • M.A. University of California at Los Angeles
  • Ph.D. University of California at Los Angeles

Selected Publications

  • The Neighboring Text: Henryson, Boccaccio, Chaucer. The University of Notre Dame Press, 2011. 

  • “Neighbors, Natural and Otherwise, in ‘The Vox and the Wolf’.” New Medieval Literatures 12 (2010): 89-114.

  • Pearl: The Shadow of the Object, the Shape of the Law.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 26 (2004): 29-63. Reprinted in Classical and Medieval Literary Criticism Online. Thomas Gale, forthcoming.

  • “Naked Chaucer.” In The Post-Historical Middle Ages, eds. Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Federico. Palgrave, 2009: 139-160.

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Works In Progress

A Politics of Melancholia 

Selected Works & Activities

  • 2011 Choice Outstanding Academic Title for The Neighboring Text

  • ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship, 2014-2015