Assistant Professor
lhcooper@wisc.edu
M.A. (1996), M. Phil. (1998), Ph.D. (2003), English and
Comparative Literature, Columbia University
B.A. (1993), English and Art History, Amherst College
Medieval literature, especially twelfth-to-fifteenth-century English and French romance; the poetry of Chaucer, his contemporaries, and successors; English cycle drama; Latin and vernacular historiography; English and European travel narrative; medieval material culture (especially the intertwined history of labor, technology, and commerce); the formation of urban identity; lexicography; and the history of the book.
“Chivalry, Commerce, and Conquest: Heywood’s The Four Prentices of London,” in Material Culture and Cultural Materialisms in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Curtis Perry, ASMAR 5 (Brepols, 2001): 159-175; “‘The ‘Boke of Oure Charges’: Constructing Community in the Masons’ Constitutions,” The Journal of the Early Book Society 6 (2003): 1-39; “Urban Utterances: Merchants, Artisans, and the Alphabet in Caxton’s Dialogues in French and English,” New Medieval Literatures 7 (2005): 127-161; “Bed, Boat, and Beyond: Fictional Furnishing in La Queste del Saint Graal,” Arthuriana 15.3 (2005): 26-50; “The Poetics of Practicality,” in 21st-Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford, 2007), pp. 491-505; “Making Space for History: Galbert of Bruges and the Murder of Charles the Good,” in Place, Space, and Landscape in Medieval Narrative, ed. Laura L. Howes (University of Tennessee Press, 2008), pp. 3-26.
I am a fellow at the UW-Madison Institute for Research in the Humanities.; in all of 2008, I will be on leave as an ACLS Fellow. During this time I will be finishing a book entitled Crafting Narratives: Artisans, Authors, and the Literary Artifact in Late Medieval England, which examines images of artisanal practice across a wide range of medieval genres and explores the way medieval writers deployed such images as they attempted to come to terms with craft labor and its implications for their own social and intellectual endeavors. I have just finished co-editing a volume entitled Lydgate Matters: Poetry and Material Culture in the Fifteenth Century (imminently forthcoming from Palgrave MacMillan), and my co-editor (Andrea Denny-Brown, UC-Riverside) and I are beginning another collection tentatively entitled Arma Christi: Devotional Objects, Representation, and Practice in Premodern Culture. Finally, I am starting a project on the relationship of medieval fictional narrative and didactic literature.
At UW-Madison I have taught “British Literature to 1750,” “Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,” and “Passion to Production: Medieval English Drama,” and, on the graduate level, “Making and Unmaking in the Middle Ages.” My plans for future courses include “John Lydgate’s Golden Verse”; “Work in the West: Literature and Labor”; “Town and Country in Medieval Literature”; “Fabula: The Medieval Short Story,” and “How-to-Texts of the Middle Ages: From Praying to Playing.”