I completed my graduate work at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto in 1990, and have been at UBC since then. I am a medievalist and a book historian. My interests include twelfth-century Anglo-Latin literature, particular Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britannie; Arthurian literature; the works of John Gower; and the post-medieval reception and transmission of medieval texts. My books include Arthurian Narrative in the Latin Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and The Arthur of Medieval Latin Literature (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011); A Companion to Gower (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004); and Printing the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). With Robert Rouse, I am the general editor of The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017).

I have just completed a co-written history of the book in Britain, and am working on a study of facsimiles of medieval manuscripts, from the early modern period to the present. I am endlessly fascinated by how the preservation and presentation of text—on the page, in the archive, in the digital world—affects how that text is received and discussed.

Selected recent publications:

“Charming the Snake: Accessing and Disciplining the Medieval Manuscript,” co-authored with Andrew Prescott. In The Cambridge Companion to Medieval British Manuscripts, edited by Orietta Da Rold and Elaine Treharne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, pp. 237 – 66

“Rolling with it: Navigating Absence in the Digital Realm.” In Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age, edited by Benjamin Albritton, Georgia Henley, and Elaine Treharne (London: Routledge, 2020), pp. 82 – 90

The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction. Co-authored with Daniel Allington, David A. Brewer, and Stephen Colclough. Edited by Zachary Lesser. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019

The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain. General editor, with Robert Rouse. Associate editors, Helen Fulton, Geoff Rector, and Jacqueline Ray. 4 vols. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017.

“Palimpsests of Place and Time in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britannie.” In Teaching and Learning in Medieval Europe: Essays in Honour of Gernot R. Wieland on his 67th Birthday, edited by Greti Dinkova-Bruun and Tristan Major (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), pp. 43-59.

“How Gower Found His Vox: Latin and John Gower’s Poetics.” The Journal of Medieval Latin 26 (2016): 291-314.

“The Naked Truth: Chaucerian Spectacle in Brian Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale.” In Chaucer on Screen: Absence, Presence, and Adapting the Canterbury Tales, edited by Kathleen Kelly and Tison Pugh (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2016), pp. 169-185.

“Containing the Book: The Institutional Afterlives of Medieval Manuscripts.” In The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches, edited by Michael Johnston and Michael van Dussen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 96-118.

“The Long and the Short of it: On Gower’s Forms.” In John Gower in England and Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception, ed. Ana Sáez-Hidalgo and R.F. Yeager (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2014), pp. 245-60.

“Remembering Brutus: Aaron Thompson’s British History of 1718.” Arthurian Literature 30 (2013): 141-69.

“Whose History? Naming Practices in the Transmission of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britannie.” Arthuriana 22.4 (2012): 8-24.

The Arthur of Medieval Latin Literature: The Development and Dissemination of the Arthurian Legend in Medieval Latin. Edited. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011.