Degrees: BA (British Columbia), MA (Western Ontario), PhD (Toronto)

I teach classes in Linguistics, Composition, and Medieval Literature, including Structure of Modern English, History of the English Language, Medieval Survey, Chaucer, Expository and Persuasive Writing, Palaeography, and Bibliography and Research Methods. I am really enthusiastic about my sometimes obscure subjects and I try to infect my students with similar enthusiasm.

My areas of research nterest are manuscript studies, Middle English language and literature, proverbs, and medieval and early modern theatre. I have spent much of my time hunting through archives and libraries for early documents written in strange scripts. For my PhD thesis (later published as a book) I edited Bodleian Tanner MS 407, which is a fifteenth-century so-called 'commonplace book' compiled by a man named Robert Reynes. I have published several articles about texts and other items I have discovered. I also published a series of articles on Middle English proverbs, as well as a 150-page reference work on the same subject for the Manual of the Writings in Middle English. In 2000 I published Records of Early English Drama: Sussex, 400-page edition of documents referring to performances of drama and music in medieval and early modern times in the county of Sussex. I have also published a feminist interpretation of plays by John Heywood. My articles have appeared in such journals as Mediaeval Studies, Florilegium, Anglia, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, English Manuscript Studies, Journal of Gender Studies, Modern Lanuage Review, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, Records of Early English Drama, and Proverbium. Currently I am studying the process of language standardization in fifteenth-century England in various regions of the country.

I have spent much of my time helping with the collegial governance of the university. From 2000-2008 I was Head of the Department.  I am currently Associate Dean (Undergraduate) of the Faculty of Arts.

My spare-time obsessions are: 1. ballroom dancing; 2. photography; 3. travelling in exotic lands; 4. major league baseball; 5. cooking gourmet Chinese dinners; 6. being trained by a Maine Coon cat. I have been married to Mary Blackstone of the Theatre Department since 1981.