Peter W. Travis
Appointments
Professor of English, Emeritus
Area of Expertise
Medieval literature,
contemporary critical theory,
Chaucer,
contemporary masculinities
Biography
My primary interests are medieval literature and contemporary critical theory. I teach courses on old and medieval English language and literature and developed and taught a course on contemporary masculinities called The Masculine Mystique. In 2010 I published Disseminal Chaucer, Rereading the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, which won the Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism.
Education
B.A. Bowdoin College
M.Litt. Trinity College, Dublin
M.A. University of Chicago
Ph.D. University of Chicago
Publications
“The English Department in the Globalized University,” ADE Bulletin , 139 (2006) 51-56.
“The Body of The Nun’s Priest, or, Chaucer’s Disseminal Genius,” in Reading Medieval Culture: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Hanning , R M Stein and S Pierson Prior (eds.), (2005), 231-247.
“The Manciple’s Phallic Matrix,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer , 25, (2003), 317-324.
“White,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer , 22, (2000), 1-66.
Dramatic Design in the Chester Cycle , (1982).
Disseminal Chaucer: Rereading the Nun's Priest's Tale (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).
"Reading Chaucer Ab Ovo: Mock-Exemplum in the Nun's Priest's Tale," in The Performance of Medieval Culture (1998), pp. 161-82.
"Chaucer's Chronographiae, the Confounded Reader, and Fourteenth-Century Measurements of Time," Disputatio 2 (1997), 1-34.
"Chaucer's Heliotropes and the Poetics of Metaphor," Speculum 72 (1997), 399-427.
"Deconstructing Chaucer's Retraction." Exemplaria 3(1991): 135-58.
"The Social Body of the Dramatic Christ in Medieval England." ACTA 13 (1987).
Dramatic Design in the Chester Cycle. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982.
Works in Progress
Disseminal Chaucer: Misreading in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale ; "Aesop’s Medieval Animots "
Contact