FACULTY & STAFF

Craig R. Davis
Professor

Send E-mail

Office: Neilson Library A/17

Phone: 585-3327

Sabbatical Spring 2013

As Director of Medieval Studies and a member of the Comparative Literature Board, Professor Craig Davis teaches Old and Middle English, Old Norse, and Medieval Celtic languages and literatures. He studied Welsh in Aberystwyth (MA) and Icelandic in Reykjavík (Fulbright Scholar) before completing his doctorate at the University of Virginia. In 1996 he published ‘Beowulf’ and the Demise of Germanic Legend in England and has been the Beowulf reviewer for “The Year’s Work in Old English Studies” since 1999. His article, “An Ethnic Dating of Beowulf” (2006), shared the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists’ prize for best essay in two years. He has also written on Celtic Britain and Anglo-Saxon England for the new Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages (2010), as well as articles on the Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies, theories of history in traditional plots, the Old English Battle of Maldon, the Icelandic family sagas, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and the Arthurian legend in Wales, France and England. He has recently completed a set of translations from Brittonic Latin and medieval Welsh for a forthcoming anthology, Arthur in History and Myth, and is currently researching the ethnogenesis of the Goths, particularly as it relates to the dating of Beowulf, after an NEH fellowship in 2010 at the American Academy in Rome. In recent years Professor Davis has taught at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and three times in the Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik at Hamburg University. He has also lectured in Italy, Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore.