Faculty Profiles

Professor Scanlon is the author of Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (1994).  He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Literature, 1100-1500 (2009), and co-editor of John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England (with James Simpson, 2005).  He has published numerous essays on Middle English, Old French, Medieval Latin texts and traditions.  He has also published on medievalism, and American and African-American Literature.  He is currently completing a lengthy study on homoeroticism in later medieval literature and culture. Its tentative title is At Sodom's Gate: The Sin Against Nature from Plato to John Lydgate.  He is also co-editing (with Susan Nakley) an anthology of essays entitled Barbarous Tongues that focuses on problem of race, religious alterity, and Christian, Muslim, and Jewish relations in later medieval culture.

Professor Levao's publications include: Selected Poems of Thomas Campion, Samuel Daniel, and Sir Walter Ralegh (2001); Renaissance Minds and Their Fictions: Cusanus, Sidney, Shakespeare (1985). He has also edited the Longman Cultural Edition of Henry IV, Parts I & II (2006). and The Annotated Frankenstein (2012), coedited with Professor Susan Wolfson.  Professor Levao has also authored the articles: "Shakespeare's Ghosts and Coleridge's Hamlet" (Journal of Romanticism, 2021); "William Davenant," Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy (2020); "La Science de Frankenstein" Frankenstein: Cree des Tenebres (2016); "'Where Black is the Color, Where None is the Number': Something from Nothing in Shakespeare's Sonnets," Literary Imagination, (2010); "They Hate us Youth': Byron's Falstaff," Literary Imagination (2009)"Among Unequals What Society: Paradise Lost and the Forms of Intimacy" (Modern Language Quarterly, 2000); "Francis Bacon and the Mobility of Science" (Representations, 1991); "Recent Studies in Marlowe" (English Literary Renaissance, 1988); "Reading the Fights: Making Sense of Professional Boxing" (Raritan, 1986); and "Sidney's Feigned Apology" (PMLA, 1979).

Ann Baynes Coiro works on seventeenth-century English literature and culture, ranging from William Shakespeare to Aphra Behn. While book history and performance theory underlie her work, form and the history of form are central. Milton’s poetry is one primary focus, particularly its deep roots in drama and performance (she is a past president of the Milton Society of America). Her many articles address the significant but relatively neglected body of post-Shakespearean drama, the diverse range of Cavalier poetry, the poetry of Robert Herrick, Amelia Lanier and Andrew Marvell, and John Dryden’s critical work.

Recently she has co-edited Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton (Cambridge University Press, 2012) with Thomas Fulton and Milton in the Long Restoration (Oxford University Press, 2016) with Blair Hoxby. With Lisa Walters and Lara Dodds she is currently editing the first collection of essays putting scholarship on Margaret Cavendish and John Milton together, Cavendish and Milton: Rethinking Seventeenth-Century Literature and Culture.

Professor Buckley specializes in comparative early modern and modern theatre and drama, with a particular emphasis on the drama’s relation to the history of modern mass culture, media, visuality, and time.  His publications include Tragedy Walks the Streets: The French Revolution in the Making of Modern Drama (Johns Hopkins, 2006), as well as articles in Modern Drama, Theatre Survey, Theatre Journal, Victorian Studies, Studies in Romanticism and elsewhere.  

For the past decade, his work has focused on the origins and early development of stage melodrama and on the broad implications of melodrama’s extended, multi-medial, trans-cultural history.  In 2012, he edited a special issue of Modern Drama (55:4) devoted to recent international scholarship on melodrama on stage, film, and television; in 2013, he founded the Melodrama Research Consortium, a global network of over 125 melodrama scholars working across the humanities and the arts, to foster, organize, and facilitate collaborative and interdisciplinary research on the topic (www.melodramaresearchconsortium.org).  His current research projects include the Digital Database of 19^th-Century British Melodrama, begun in 2008, which now includes more than 10,000 entries and is currently being used to generate the first historical atlas of British stage melodrama’s emergence and growth, and the Melodrama Database Project, an international, interdisciplinary effort, begun in 2013 and now including more than three dozen scholars, to design and construct a digital database of the global history of stage, film, television, and new media melodrama. 

Professor Buckley is currently the director of the Melodrama Research Consortium and the Melodrama Database Project and the chief editor of the Ashgate Research Companion to Melodrama, a comprehensive guide to melodrama scholarship planned for publication in 2018. His current book projects include Becoming Melodramatic, which explores melodrama’s historical formation, examines its formal development and cultural impact, and assesses that history’s challenge to our understanding of both melodrama and narrative culture in modernity, and Place of Seeing, a re-examination of major works in the history of Western theatre iconography.