Neilson A/17, x3327, cradavis@email.smith.edu
Craig Davis teaches Old and Middle English, Old Norse, and Medieval Welsh language and literature, and has directed both the Medieval Studies and Comparative Literature programs at Smith College. He has lectured in England, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands. He received his BA from the College of William and Mary (1974); his MA from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth (1980); and his PhD from the University of Virginia (1983). He was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Iceland (1981-82), Mellon Scholar in the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Virginia (1983-85), and Visiting Scholar in Medieval Scandinavian Studies at the University of New Mexico-Albuquerque (2006).
Professor Davis is the author of ‘Beowulf’ and the Demise of Germanic Legend in England (1996) and has been the Beowulf reviewer for The Year’s Work in Old English Studies since 1999. His publications include “Theories of History in Traditional Plots,” in Myth in Northwest Europe (2007); “An Ethnic Dating of Beowulf,” Anglo-Saxon England (2006);
“The Earliest Arthurian Poems in Welsh,” Metamorphoses (2005); “Ancrene Riwle,” in Women in the Middle Ages (2004); “A Perfect Marriage on the Rocks: Geoffrey and Philippa Chaucer, and the Franklin’s Tale,” Chaucer Review (2002); “Redundant Ethnogenesis in Beowulf,” Heroic Age (2001); “Cultural Historicity in The Battle of Maldon,” Philological Quarterly (1999); “Cultural Assimilation in Njáls saga,” Oral Tradition (1998); “Biblical Typology in Malory’s Morte Darthur,” Mediaevalia (1994); and “Cultural Assimilation in the Anglo-Saxon Royal Genealogies” (1992), Anglo-Saxon England.
Professor Davis has just completed a set of translations from the Brittonic Latin and Medieval Welsh sources of the Arthurian legend, part of a larger anthology in preparation of Old French and Middle English Arthurian literature. His current project is entitled, “A Mother from Hell: Love and Violence in Beowulf,” on what that poem can tell us about the legal status of blood feud in later Anglo-Saxon England. |
Craig R. Davis