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Degrees

  • B.A., Marquette 1981
  • M.A., Virginia 1984
  • Ph.D., Virginia 1992
Areas of Interest

Prendergast specializes in Old and Middle English Literature, and Theories of Medievalism.

Courses Taught
  • ENGL 120: Investigations in Literary and Cultural Studies (Gods and Monsters)
  • ENGL 200: Investigations in Literary Theory and Research Methods
  • ENGL 210: Gender, Sex and Texts, 350-1500
  • ENGL 240: The Canterbury Tales and the Forms of Medieval Narrative
  • ENGL 240: Medieval Literature: The Place of the Premodern
  • CMLT 290: Filming the Occult
  • ENGL 300: Political Theater
  • ENGL 401: Perspectives and Methods of Independent Study
  • ENGL 451-452: Senior Independent Study Thesis
Publications

Books

  • Poetical Dust: Poets’ Corner and the Making of Britain (Forthcoming, University of Pennsylvania Press)
  • Chaucer’s Dead Body: From Corpse to Corpus (2004, Routledge)
  • Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority and the Idea of the Authentic Text 1400-1602 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999) (Co-edited with Barbara Kline)

Articles

  • “Geoffrey Chaucer and the Anti-presence of Early Modern Celebrity” in Chaucer and Fame, ed. Catherine Nall and Isabel Davis (Boydell and Brewer, 2015).
  • “Canon Formation” in A Handbook to Middle English Studies, ed. Marion Turner (Blackwells, 2013).
  • “Authorizing Will: John But and the Recuperation of William Langland” in Ye, baw for bokes: Essays in Honor of Hoyt N. Duggan ed. Michael Calabrese and Stephen Shepherd (Marymount Press, 2013).
  • With Maria T. Prendergast, “The Invention of Propaganda: a Critical Commentary on and Translation of Inscrutabili Divinae Providentiae Arcano,” in The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies, ed. Jonathan Auerbach and Russ Castronovo (Oxford, 2013).
  • “Impossible Dissent,” postmedieval Forum III: Dissent (2012).
  • “The Work of Robert Langland” in Renaissance Retrospections, ed. Sarah Kelen (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2012).
  • With Stephanie Trigg, “The Negative Erotics of Medievalism.” in Post Historical Middle Ages, ed. Sylvia Federico and Liz Scala (Palgrave, 2009).
  • “Spenser’s Phantastic History, The Ruines of Time and the Invention of Medievalism,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38 (Spring, 2008).
  • With Stephanie Trigg, “What is Happening to the Middle Ages?” New Medieval Literatures 9 (2008).
  • “The Invisible Spouse: Arthur, Henry VI and the Fifteenth-Century Subject,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38 (2002).
  • “Writing, Authenticity and the Fabrication of the Chaucerian Text” (Introduction to Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority and the Idea of the Authentic Text 1400-1602 [Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999]).
  • “Chaucer’s Doppelgänger: Thomas Usk and the Reformation of Chaucer,” (in Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority and the Idea of the Authentic Text 1400-1602 [Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999]).
  • “’Wanton Recollection’: The Idolatrous Pleasures of Beowulf,” in New Literary History 30.1 (1999).
  • “Politics, Prodigality and the Reception of Chaucer’s ‘Purse,’” in Reinventing the Middle Ages, Ed. William Gentrup (Belgium: Brepols, 1998).

Current projects include a book on the theory of medievalism, being jointly written with Stephanie Trigg of the University of Melbourne entitled “Medievalism and Its Discontents,” and a collection of essays co-edited with Jessica Rosenfeld (“Textual Agencies: Chaucer and the Subject of Form”).