Ithaca College

On Monday, October 24th, at 5:30 p.m. in Business 103, Joyce Coleman, Department of English, University of Oklahoma, will give a talk titled "'Withinne a Paved Parlour':  Criseyde and Domestic Reading in a City under Siege."  The phrase quoted in her title comes from the scene in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (II.82) in which Pandarus encounters Criseyde and two other women listening to the story of the siege of Thebes being read aloud.

Joyce Coleman is the Rudolph C. Bambas Professor of Medieval English Literature and Culture (appointed in 2005), and since 2013 she has also been the Director of the University of Oklahoma Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. 

Professor Coleman’s first book, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge University Press, 1996; reprinted 1998, 2000, 2003; issued in paperback 2005) was hailed by reviewers in American, British, and European literary journals as a major new study of medieval reading practices.  The Times Literary Supplement (no. 4921; July 25, 1997, p. 33) called it “ground-breaking work, conducted with im­pressive wit and incision” in which Professor Coleman introduces “a range of new terms, new categories which actually fit the evidence we have for the reception of literature in late medieval England (evi­dence which is systematically presented here for the first time),” and added that her book “ought to be a turning-point in our approach to literacy and in our con­struction of the history of reading.”

More recently, Professor Coleman has co-edited a well-received collection of essays (with Kathryn A. Smith and Mark Cruse) on the relationship between texts and images in medieval manuscripts titled The Social Life of Illumination: Manuscripts, Images, and Communities in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), with contributions in Art History, English, and French.  Professor Coleman's nearly 30 articles and book chapters have appeared in refereed journals such as Speculum, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Philological Quarterly, Arthurian Literature, Cahiers de Littérature Orale, and the British Library Journal, and in books published by Boydell and Brewer, the Modern Language Association, Brepols, The Getty Museum, and Oxford University Press.  She has delivered over 40 invited lectures and conference papers, and she has published numerous reviews in scholarly journals.

Professor Coleman has been honored with fellowships from Clare Hall, Cambridge University (where she is also a life member as of 2012); the American Philosophical Society (2010, 1994); the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA (2009); the National Endowment for the Humanities (2000, 1997); and Wolfson College, Cambridge University (1998).  She has been a visiting professor at New York University and the University of Oslo.  Professor Coleman received her B.A. from Barnard College and her Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.  At the University of Oklahoma, she teaches classes on medieval literature as well as on modern uses of medieval material, such as the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Click here to see a short film that she and a class of graduate students made of the scene from Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde that she will discuss in Monday’s lecture at IC.

Individuals with disabilities requiring accommodations should contact Michael Twomey at twomey@ithaca.edu or (607) 274-3564. We ask that requests for accommodations be made as soon as possible.