Washington University
Lectures, Readings, Colloquia

Event in Honor of David Lawton

We would like to invite you to an event celebrating the work of our colleague David Lawton. This is an occasion to honor David’s contributions to the study of medieval literature, the English Department, and the University. 

Join in via Zoom, Friday, October 28, 1:00pm CDT

 

Please email the English office at english@wustl.edu for the full Zoom invite.

 

Live from Normandy, David will give a talk titled, "Phonomachia: The Conflict between Language and Voice."

 

We will be joined by several of David's former students, Zooming in from Geneva, Minnesota, Louisiana, Indiana, and St. Louis.

 

David Lawton was awarded the 2022 Sir Israel Gollancz Prize for his lifetime contributions to Middle English studies and field-defining research.  He is is Professor of English at Durham University, UK and Emeritus Professor at Washington University in St. Louis.  David has published extensively on Middle English alliterative poetry, editing Joseph of Arimathea (1983) and (with Ralph Hanna) The Siege of Jerusalem (Early English Text Society, 2003), and on Chaucer, publishing Chaucer’s Narrators in 1985 and his edition of Chaucer’s complete works for Norton in 2019. He has published books on the Bible in English and on blasphemy, and is an authority on Middle English biblical translation. He is the longest-serving Executive Director of the New Chaucer Society (2002-12) and was founding co-editor (1998-2018) of the annual New Medieval Literatures. His most recent monograph is Voice in Later Medieval English Literature: Public Interiorities (Oxford University Press, 2017), described by one reviewer as "necessary reading for those interested in the literature, culture, and history of the European Middle Ages." A volume of essays in his honor, Medieval Literary Voices, edited by his former advisees Sif Ríkharðsdóttir and Louise D’Arcens, was published in July 2022, and includes a chapter on his scholarly career by John M. Ganim.