Randy Schiff
Interests
late-Medieval literature and culture, Middle English alliterative verse, nationalism and empire, ecocriticism, literary history, Arthurian literature, Old French, biopolitics
Works in Progress
- “Of Cygnets, Exception, and Territory: Swan-Knights and Western Aristocratic Other-Lordliness” (essay)
- Bio-Exceptionalism: Animals, Woodlands, and Territory in Medieval Romance (manuscript)
Selected Publications
- “Alliterative Verse in Middle English.” Oxford Bibliographies in Medieval Studies. Ed. Christopher Kleinhenz. Oxford University Press, April 17 2025.
- “Alcohol, Community, and Chaucer’s Pardoner: Ale as a Populist Antidote to Alienating Avant-Gardism,” in Beer and Brewing in Medieval Culture and Contemporary Medievalism, ed. John A. Geck, Rosemary O’Neill, and Noelle Phillips (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2022), pp. 341–362.
- “Ennobling Centralization: Lancelot of the Laik and the Romance of Subjection,” The Mediaeval Journal 10.1 (2020): 59-79.
- “Economics of Otherness in Pearl: Fluidity and Identity,” Journal of English Language and Literature 63.1 (2017): 63-78.
- The Politics of Ecology: Land, Life, and Law in Medieval Britain, ed. Randy P. Schiff and, Joseph Taylor (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016).
- “On Firm Carthaginian Ground: Ethnic Boundary Fluidity and Chaucer’s Dido,” postmedieval 6.1 (2015): 23-35.
- “Reterritorialized Ritual: Classist Violence in Yvain and Ywain and Gawain,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 56.3 (2014): 227-58.
- “Resisting Surfaces: Description, Distance Reading, and Textual Entanglement,” Exemplaria 26.2-3 (2014): 273-90.
- “Unstable Kinship: Trojanness, Treason, and Community in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” College Literature 40.2 (2013): 81-102.
- Revivalist Fantasy: Alliterative Verse and Nationalist Literary History (Ohio State University Press, 2011) https://ohiostatepress.org/
- "Cross-Channel Becomings-Animal: Primal Courtliness in Guillaume de Palerne and William of Palerne." Exemplaria 21.4 (2009): 418-38.
- "The Loneness of the Stalker: Poaching and Subjectivity in The Parlement of the Thre Ages." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 51.3 (2009): 263-93.
- "Borderland Subversions: Anti-Imperialist Energies in The Awntyrs off Arthure and Golagros and Gawane." Speculum 84.3 (2009): 613-32.
- "Holland as Howlat: Shadow Self and Borderland Homage in The Buke of the Howlat." Mediaevalia 29.2 (2008): 91-116.
- "The Instructive Other Within: Secularized Jews in The Siege of Jerusalem." Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Archipelago, Island, England, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008), pp. 135-51.