Thomas Reed
Professor of English

phone: 717.245.1216
fax: 717.245.1942
reedt@dickinson.edu

I was trained at the University of Virginia as a medievalist and teach a range of courses that focus on the Middle Ages -- one admittedly using Monty Python and the Holy Grail as a quirky but useful gateway to the period. Classes on Geoffrey Chaucer and Marie de France are among my staple offerings, in part because of the pair’s unusual capacity to challenge the traditional ideas they encountered in life and art. For similar reasons, I would say, the “horror writers” of late-Victorian Britain have inspired my courses revolving around works like Dracula and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I also regularly teach classes on film adaptations of literary classics

My scholarly interests follow the same lines as my teaching, with the two regularly growing into and out of each other. I have written on Chaucer, the Gawain-poet, and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction as a latter-day Arthurian romance, but my most recent work has been on the way Marie de France teaches her readers how to interpret her symbolism and on Robert Louis Stevenson’s exploration of the uses and dangers of alcohol.

Sample syllabi:

Critical Approaches and Literary Methods

Marie de France

Monty Python and the Real Grail

Senior Writing Workshop

Chaucer

Freshman Seminar: Safe as Houses

Jekylls and Hydes

From Novel to Film: Coppola

Medieval Romance

 

Chapter Outline for Stevenson Book

 

Recently published fiction:

Come Along

Valley of the Shadow