Professor of English

376 Bachelor Hall
Oxford Campus
(513) 529 5982
harwoobj@miamioh.edu

Education

Ph.D. in English Language and Literature, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1970

M.S. in Education, Canisius College

B.A. in Philosophy, Hamilton College

Teaching Interests

• Middle English literature
• Theory of genre
• Theory of criticism

Research Interests

• Chaucer
• Epic and society in the Middle Ages
• Theory of genre

Selected Publications

• “Anxiety Over Peasants: Textual Disorder in Winner and Waster.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2006.
• “Chaucer and the Gift (If There Is Any).” Studies in Philology, 2006.
• “Same Sex Desire in the Unconscious of Chaucer’s Parliament,” Exemplaria 13:1 (Spring 2001).
• “Psychoanalytic Politics: Chaucer and Two Peasants,” ELH, 2001.
• “The Political Use of Chaucer in America at the Present Time,” in Medievalism in the Modern World, ed. T.A. Shippey and Richard Utz (Brepols, 1998).
• Class and Gender in Early English Literature: Intersections, co-edited with Gillian R. Overing. Indiana University Press, 1994.
• “The Alliterative Morte Arthure As a Witness to Epic,” in Orality in the Middle English Period, ed. Mark Amodio (Garland, 1994).
• Piers Plowman and the Problem of Belief. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991, 1992, 1994.
• “Gawain and the Gift.” PMLA 106 (1991).
• “Pearl as Diptych,” in Text and Matter: New Critical Perspectives of the Pearl-Poet, ed. Robert J. Blanch, Miriam Youngerman Miller, and Julian N. Wasserman (Troy, N. Y.: Whitson, 1991).
• “Chaucer’s Pardoner: The Dialectics of Inside and Outside,” Philological Quarterly, 1988.
• “Chaucer and the Silence of History.” PMLA 102 (1987).

Work in Progress

Dr. Harwood’s principal piece of work in progress is Pluralist Chaucer: Synthesis and Difference in Contemporary Critical Theory. In it, he attempts to dialecticize critical pluralism and political pluralism, arguing that only a pluralism of critical procedures can produce the historical specificity that political pluralism supposes. He is also working on two freestanding essays: an argument that the therapy employed by the narrator in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess in effect anticipates Freud’s point in the famous Fort-Da passage in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and a feminist reading of the Middle English Sir Orfeo.