Helen Barr | |
---|---|
Born | 1961 (age 62–63) |
Nationality | English |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford |
Thesis | A study of Mum and the sothsegger in its political and literary contexts (1989) |
Academic work | |
Discipline | English literature |
Sub-discipline | |
Institutions | University of Sussex Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford |
Helen Barr (born 1961) [1] is an academic specialising in English literature on the late medieval period. She has spent her entire career at the University of Oxford, and, in 2016, the university awarded her the title of Professor of English Literature.
Barr completed her Bachelor of Arts, Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy degrees at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. In 1995, she was elected a fellow at LMH and appointed a university lecturer in English. [2] [3] Her appointment was made permanent until retirement age in 2000. [4] Barr has also taught at the University of Sussex and, as of 2017, is vice-principal of LMH. [2] In 2016, the University of Oxford awarded her the title of Professor of English Literature. [5]
Barr research focuses on English literature in the late medieval period, and she has published books on Geoffrey Chaucer's influence on visual and literary culture. She has also researched the literary geography of Kent and Leicester. Her published works include: [2]
Geoffrey Chaucer was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for The Canterbury Tales. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He was the first writer to be buried in what has since come to be called Poets' Corner, in Westminster Abbey. Chaucer also gained fame as a philosopher and astronomer, composing the scientific A Treatise on the Astrolabe for his 10-year-old son, Lewis. He maintained a career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier, diplomat, and member of parliament.
Piers Plowman or Visio Willelmi de Petro Ploughman is a Middle English allegorical narrative poem by William Langland. It is written in un-rhymed, alliterative verse divided into sections called passus.
Troilus and Criseyde is an epic poem by Geoffrey Chaucer which re-tells in Middle English the tragic story of the lovers Troilus and Criseyde set against a backdrop of war during the siege of Troy. It was written in rime royale and probably completed during the mid-1380s. Many Chaucer scholars regard it as the poet's finest work. As a finished long poem, it is more self-contained than the better known but ultimately unfinished The Canterbury Tales. This poem is often considered the source of the phrase: "all good things must come to an end" (3.615).
Adam Pinkhurst is best known as a fourteenth-century English scribe whom Linne Mooney identified as the 'personal scribe' of Geoffrey Chaucer, although much recent scholarship has cast doubt on this connection.
Pierce the Ploughman's Crede is a medieval alliterative poem of 855 lines, lampooning the four orders of friars.
Nevill Henry Kendal Aylmer Coghill was an Anglo-Irish literary scholar, known especially for his modern-English version of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. He was an associate of the literary discussion group "The Inklings", which included J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.
Elizabeth Helen Cooper,, known as Helen Cooper, is a British literary scholar. From 2004 to 2014, she was Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge.
Martha Reeves is a vowed Anglican solitary, with Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, as bishop-protector. A graduate of the Madeira School, she is also a Stanford-educated professor of theology who has written numerous articles and books under the name "Maggie Ross" as well as translated a number of Carthusian Novice Conferences. Reeves, at one time Desmond Tutu's spiritual director, was Bell Distinguished Professor in Anglican and Ecumenical Studies appointed to the Department of Philosophy and Religion, Kendall College of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tulsa. In 1995, "A Rite for Contemplative Eucharist" emerged while being a theologian-in-residence in an Episcopal church in the Diocese of Southern Ohio. In March 2008, she donated 'silence' to the Museum of Curiosity.. Ross as an interviewee also shared about silence in the 2015 documentary In Pursuit of Silence directed by Patrick Shen. In October 2016, she gave the lecture "Healing Silence' at Durham University for its "Spirituality, Theology, and Health Seminar Series." The Hay Festival has been an event for presenting about the 'work of silence' under the topic title "Maggie Ross Talks to Rachael Kerr". She was an attendee of the 2018 Epiphany Conference on science and religion, a collaborative initiative between the Cambridge Epiphany Philosophers and the Oxford Monastic Institute. The 'work of silence' has touched grounds for many years now through the ravenwilderness blogspot, and an index of posts from 2006 to 2013 can be viewed from here and the entries from 2013 to 2020 here. The British & Irish Association for Practical Theology (BIAPT) had a planned inaugural event for its Spirituality Interest Special Group in 2020, with Ross as keynote speaker but was postponed. The keynote address "Silent Ways of Knowing" had been shared in four parts in Ross's blog. Reeves lives in Oxford, the United Kingdom, where a number of sermons and talks had been shared through the years in churches and academia around the area.
James Simpson is an Australian-British-American medievalist currently serving as the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University.
Anne Middleton was an American medievalist, and the Florence Green Bixby Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.
Wendy Scase is Emeritus Geoffrey Shepherd Professor of Medieval English Literature at the University of Birmingham. Her research interests include medieval manuscript production and use; histories of literacy; and relations between medieval literature and law, politics, and religion.
Anne Mary Hudson, was a British literary historian and academic. She was a Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford from 1963 to 2003, and Professor of Medieval English at the University of Oxford from 1989 to 2003.
Nicolette "Nicky" Zeeman is a British literary scholar. She has been Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge since January 2016 and a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge since 1995.
Sebastian Sobecki is a medievalist specialising in English literature, history, and manuscript studies.
Thorlac Francis Samuel Turville-Petre is an English philologist who is Professor Emeritus and former head of the School of English at the University of Nottingham. He specializes in the study of Middle English literature.
George Joseph Kane, FBA, FKC was a Canadian literary scholar whose career was spent in England and the United States. A co-editor of the three-volume critical edition of William Langland's 14th-century poem Piers Plowman, he held professorships at Royal Holloway College, King's College London and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Marion Turner is the J. R. R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language at the University of Oxford and an academic authority on Geoffrey Chaucer. She has authored several books, including Chaucer: A European Life, which was shortlisted in 2020 for the Wolfson History Prize, and was a finalist in the PROSE Awards, and for which she was awarded the 2020 Rose Mary Crawshay Prize.
Emily Steiner is the Rose Family Endowed Chair Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is known for her work on medieval literature and middle English literature and culture.
Mary Clemente Davlin was a Sinsinawa Dominican Sister, an advocate for diversity in higher education, and a noted scholar of medieval studies, particularly the allegorical poem Piers Plowman. The Sister Mary Clemente Davlin Diversity Leadership Award at Dominican University is given annually in her honor, as is a Waters, Davlin, Crapo “sisters” scholarship specifically for African American students.
Helen Fulton is currently professor of Medieval Literature at the University of Bristol.