My usual courses are in medieval literature, English Language Arts (for the graduate education program) and the Bible. Since 2002, when I started a Latin program that is now part of the Classics Minor, I have also taught Latin. Through grants from the Keck and Hewlett foundations as well as from Ithaca College, I have promoted the use of technology in humanities teaching.
These days I am very interested in eco-criticism, which considers the role and representation of the environment in literature. In "Sir Gawain and the 'Green World,'" which I presented at the XXIIIrd Congress of the International Arthurian Society (Bristol, UK) in July of 2011, I argue against post-Romantic readings of the forest of adventure in the 14th century romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. What I've found is that the forest where Gawain is lodged for the Christmas season while he awaits his fateful meeting with the enchanted Green Knight is characterized as a typical medieval English game preserve whose environmental practices regarding animal and plant life can be inferred quite clearly. In my ecological reading, the idealized forest we see in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is an exercise in environmental nostalgia constructed for the top carnivores of the trophic pyramid of food consumption, who are no closer to the wilderness than was Henry David Thoreau during his time at Walden Pond.
One of my other interests is early English pronunciation. You can hear me reading passages from Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur in a reconstructed 15th-century London pronunciation on the CD "Malory Aloud: A Dramatic Reading of Excerpts from Le Morte Darthur," produced by the Chaucer Studio. My essay about these readings, “The Voice of Aurality in the Morte Darthur,” won the James Randall Leader Prize for Outstanding Essay in Arthuriana, 2003, from the International Arthurian Society, North American Branch.
I am on the editorial board of the journal Arthurian Literature (Cambridge, UK), and I am in my second three-year term as the English literature representative on the executive board of the International Arthurian Society, North American Branch.
"Literary Scholars as Sleuths," IC View 26.4 (2008), tells the story of twin discoveries by a former student, Steve Hartman (English '87), and me. In the Swedish National Library, Stockholm, Steve, now a professor in Sweden, found a letter by Henry David Thoreau that was believed to be lost. In a manuscript in the British Library, London, I found a previously unknown letter written in the voice of Morgan le Fay, Arthurian legend's fairy queen. My article about this discovery was published in 2008.
My career at Ithaca College began in 1980. From 1995 to 2002, and again in Fall 2006, I was department chair. During sabbaticals I have taught at the University of Maryland's Munich Campus (1988-89) and at the University of Dresden (1996-97), the latter courtesy of a Fulbright senior lectureship. In September 2002 I returned to Dresden to teach a one-week graduate seminar on medieval literature and critical theory. Elsewhere in Europe and in North America I have given over fifty lectures at various universities and conferences.
Public web page
Travels With Sir Gawain: My Journey to the Green Chapel in July, 2002
http://www.ithaca.edu/faculty/twomey/travels
Current research projects
I am part of an international team based in Germany and Belgium that is producing an edition of the French and Latin versions of the medieval encyclopedia De proprietatibus rerum by Bartholomaeus Anglicus, which is often referred to as "Shakespeare's encyclopedia." In summer 2003 I was assisted by Jason Daniel, an IC senior with a grant from the Emerson Foundation that supported his research on this project. The first volume of the edition appeared in April, 2007. Currently I am editing Book XIV, on the earth and its properties.
Some recent publications
"Ye Olde English Ye: A Short Biography of Anglo-Saxon Thorn," in Fact and Fiction from the Middle Ages to Modern Times: Essays Presented to Hans Sauer on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, ed.Renate Bauer and Ulrike Krischke (Münchener Universitätsschriften 37)(Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2011), pp. 177-95.
"'Hadet with an aluisch mon' and 'britned to no3t': Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Death, and the Devil," in The Arthurian Way of Death: The English Tradition, ed. Karen Cherewatuk and K. S. Whetter. Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2009. pp. 73-93.
"'Morgan le Fay, Empress of the Wilderness': A Newly Recovered Arthurian Text in London, BL Royal 12.c.ix," Arthurian Literature 25 (2008), 67-91. (This volume reviewed in Times Literary Supplement (London), no. 5509, October 31, 2008, pp. 26-7.)
“Encyclopedias,” in Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. II: 1100-1400, ed. Nigel Morgan and Rodney M. Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 244-49. (Book reviewed in Times Literary Supplement (London), no. 5507, October 17, 2008, p. 32.)
Reviews for Speculum: Journal of the Medieval Academy of America; Journal of Medieval Latin; Scriptorium; and other journals.
