Frank Grady

Education

PhD, University of California, Berkeley
BA, Harvard University

About

Frank Grady teaches courses in medieval literature, literary theory, and film. He has written widely on Chaucer and his contemporaries, and he served as editor of the annual  Studies in the Age of Chaucer from 2002-2007. His book  Representing Righteous Heathens in Late Medieval England (2005) explores how medieval writers used the figure of the virtuous pagan to confront a variety of historical, cultural, and formal literary issues. His edited collections include Answerable Style: Form and History in Medieval English Literature (2013; co-edited with Andrew Galloway), the second edition of the MLA's Approaches to Teaching Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (2014; with Peter Travis), and The Cambridge Companion to the Canterbury Tales (2020).

He served as Chair of English from 2014-2022 and as Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences in 2022-23.

Current projects include more work on Piers Plowman and on Malory’s Morte Darthur and a study of literate practices in fifteenth-century England. When not in the office or the classroom, he can be found cooking, fishing, birding, streaming sci-fi series, raising monarch butterflies, and playing keyboards in his Steely Dan tribute band, the Luckless Pedestrians.*

            * note: one of these things is not actually true.

Frequently Taught Courses

ENGL 3310 - English Literature Before 1790
ENGL 4270 - Medieval English Literature
ENGL 4260 - Chaucer
ENGL 4950 - Cool Old Movies
ENGL 5250 - Studies in Middle English Literature
ENGL 5950 - Studios and Stars/American Cinema of the 1930s and 1940s

Publications

“Langland’s Love-dream,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 48 (2026): 61-99

“Petrarch in Yorkshire, or the Will as Archive,” The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 56:3 (2026): 477-96.

“The Year of Living Decanally, or Non-Regular Research,” New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession 5 (2024): 69–78.

“Moral Chaucer,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Canterbury Tales, ed. Grady, below (2020): 205-217.

Editor, The Cambridge Companion to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020)

“Chaucer’s Langland’s Boethius,” The Yearbook of Langland Studies 32 (2018): 271-87.

“Hunting and fortune in the Book of the Duchess and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” in Contemporary Chaucer across the Centuries: Essays for Stephanie Trigg , ed. Helen M. Hickey, Anne McKendry, and Melissa Raine (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 109-124.      

Editor, with Peter Travis, Approaches to Teaching Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Second Edition (New York: Modern Language Association, 2014)

“Seigneurial Poetics, or The Poacher, the Prikasour , the Hunt and Its Oeuvre,” 195-213 in Answerable Style , ed. Grady and Galloway, below (2013).

Editor, with Andrew Galloway, Answerable Style: Form and History in Medieval English Literature (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2013)

“Looking Awry at St. Erkenwald,” Exemplaria 23.2 (Summer 2011): 105-25.

Editor, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, vols. 25 (2003) – 29 (2007)

Representing Righteous Heathens in Late Medieval England , (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2005)

Preface to The Canterbury Tales: A Selection , ed. Donald Howard (Signet Classics, 2005)

“Contextualizing Alexander and Dindimus,” The Yearbook of Langland Studies 18 (2004): 81-106.

“Arnoldian Humanism, or Amnesia and Autobiography in the Schwarzenegger Action Film,” Cinema Journal 42 (Winter 2003): 41-56. [available through Project Muse]

"Gower's Boat, Richard's Barge, and the True Story of the Confessio Amantis:Text and Gloss," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44:1(Spring 2002): 1-15. [available through Project Muse]

"The Generation of 1399," in The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England , edited by Emily Steiner and Candace Barrington (Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 202-29.

" St. Erkenwald and the Merciless Parliament," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000):179-211.

"The Boethian Reader of Troilus and Criseyde," The Chaucer Review 33 (1998): 230-251.

"Vampire Culture," in Monster Theory: Reading Culture , ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (University of Minnesota Press, 1996): 225-41.

"Chaucer Reading Langland: The House of Fame," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 18 (1996): 3-23.

" Machomete and Mandeville's Travels," in Medieval Christian Perceptions of Islam , ed. John Tolan (Garland Publishing, 1996): 271-88. Reprinted by Routledge, 2000.

"The Lancastrian Gower and the Limits of Exemplarity," Speculum 70 (1995): 552-75. [available through JSTOR]

" Piers Plowman , St. Erkenwald, and the Rule of Exceptional Salvations," The Yearbook of Langland Studies 6 (1992): 61-86.