Profile
Professor Sylvia Tomasch has returned to the English Department after five years as Associate University Dean of Academic Affairs at Macaulay Honors College. Formerly Chair of the English (2002-05), she is also a past president of the Medieval Club of New York, served five years on the Executive Committee of the Chaucer Division of the Modern Language Association (Chair, 2005-06), and is completing her five-year term on the Executive Committee of the Comparative Medieval Division (Chair 2009-10).
Professor Tomasch’s scholarly interests include medieval literature, especially Middle English and Chaucer, historical cartography, medieval antisemitism, and the history of the discipline of Medieval Studies. Recent publications include the articles “Honorable Technology” (reprinted internationally), "Professionalizing Chaucer: John Matthews Manly, Edith Rickert, and the Canterbury Tales as Cultural Capital,” and "Editing as Palinode: The Invention of Love and The Text of The Canterbury Tales”; two reprinted articles, "Postcolonial Chaucer and the Virtual Jew" and "Mappae Mundi and ‘The Knight’s Tale’: The Cartography of Power, The Technology of Control”; and two co-edited volumes of essays, Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages (which also contains two articles, "Introduction: Geographical Desire" and "Judecca, Dante's Satan, and the Dis-placed Jew") and The Performance of Middle English Culture: Essays on Chaucer and the Drama in Honor of Martin Stevens.
When she’s not spending her summer doing archeology in Spain, Dr. Tomasch is working on a cultural biography of John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert and has begun a new project on Surveillance Studies and Medieval Practice.