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Laura L. Howes

Professor Howes’ area of specialization is Middle English literature, and her current book project focuses on the representation of place and space in Middle English texts.  Trekking the Medieval Landscape uses The Book of Margery Kempe, Mandeville’s Travels, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Canterbury Tales and other works to investigate how Middle English authors conceived of and represented the spaces their characters inhabit and traverse, and the places they name.

Professor Howes regularly teaches graduate and undergraduate classes in Chaucer, medieval literature, and medieval and Renaissance women writers.  A new language course (403) in Middle English offers both graduate and undergraduate students the opportunity to study a variety of English dialects from the 12th through the 15th centuries.

Selected Publications

  • Ed., with Marie Borroff, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Norton Critical Edition (NY: Norton [forthcoming in 2009]).
  • Ed., Place, Space, and Landscape in Medieval Narrative.  Tennessee Studies in Literature, vol. 43 (Knoxville: UT Press, 2007).
  • Chaucer's Gardens and the Language of Convention (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997).

Representative articles

  • “Chaucer’s Criseyde: The Betrayer Betrayed,” Reading Medieval Culture: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Hanning, ed. S.P. Prior and R. Stein (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), pp. 324-43.
  • “’The Slow Curve of the Footwalker’: Narrative Time and Literary Landscapes in Middle English Poetry.”  Soundings: An Interdiscplinary Journal 83.1 (2000): 165-81;  rpt. in Inventing Medieval Landscapes: Senses of Place in Western Europe, ed. John Howe and Michael Wolfe (Gainesville: University Press of Flordida, 2002), pp. 192-207.
  • "Theophany in the 'Miller's Tale'" (with Frederick M. Biggs), Medium AEvum LXV (1996), 269-79
  • "Cultured Nature in Chaucer's Early Dream-Poems," Medieval View of Nature, ed. Joyce E. Salisbury (Garland Press, 1993), 187-200
  • "On the Birth of Margery Kempe's Last Child," Modern Philology 90.2 (November 1992), 220-25

Honors

  • Chancellor’s Citation for Excellence in Advising, 2006-07
  • James T. Chappell Scholar-in-the-Schools, 2000-01
  • College of Arts and Sciences Faculty Advising Service Award, 1998-99
  • College of Arts and Sciences Junior Teaching Award, 1993-94
  • John C. Hodges Excellence in Teaching Award, 1991


Laura L. Howes

Contact Information

Laura L. Howes
Associate Professor
Department of English
404 McClung Tower
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, TN 37996-0430

Office: (865) 974-6954
Fax: (865) 974-6926
E-mail: lhowes@utk.edu

Education

B.A., Cornell University
M.A., Ph.D., Columbia University

Research

Medieval Literature