Associate Professor
Ph.D. (2007),Columbia University, English and Comparative Literature
M.A. (2000),Columbia University, English and Comparative Literature
B.A. (1999), University of New Hampshire, English
Bio
My research interests include: the literature of medieval and Early Modern Europe, Mediterranean Studies, travel writing, gender and sexuality studies, ecology, critical theory, art history, and global cinema. My first book, The Medieval Invention of Travel (University of Chicago Press, 2017), explains how the emergence of new literary genres, textual communities, and technologies of writing transformed attitudes toward travel in late-medieval Europe. I am currently working on a new book Hollywood Horror and the Gothic Fly, which places horror cinema’s treatment of the common housefly within the context of the history of premodern science, theology, and painting.
Publications:
- Shayne Aaron Legassie, The Medieval Invention of Travel (University of Chicago Press, 2017).
- John Ganim and Shayne Aaron Legassie, Editors, Cosmopolitanism and the Middle Ages (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013).
- Shayne Aaron Legassie, “Mobility,” in A Cultural History of Western Empires, Vol. 2: The Middle Ages, ed. Matthew Gabriele (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), pp. 115-137.
- Shayne Aaron Legassie. “The Pilgrimage Road in Middle English Literature” in Road Works: Medieval Roads, Medieval England, Ed. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2016), pp. 198-218.
- Shayne Aaron Legassie. “The Lies of the Painters: Artisan Trickery and the Labor of Painting in Boccaccio’s Decameron and Sacchetti’s Trecentonovelle” in Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (Fall 2013), pp. 487-519.
- Shayne Aaron Legassie. “Chivalric Travel in the Mediterranean: Converts, Kings, and Christian Knights in Pero Tafur’s Andanças” in Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies41.3 (Fall 2011), pp. 515-44.
- Shayne Aaron Legassie. “Chaucer’s Pardoner and Host—On the Road, in the Alehouse,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 29(2007), pp. 183-223.
Awards
- Southern Atlantic Modern Language Association: SAMLA Studies Book Award – Monograph (2018), The Medieval Invention of Travel
Courses Taught:
- CMPL 122—Literature and the Visual Arts from Antiquity to 1750
- CMPL 123—Literature and Politics from Antiquity to 1750
- CMPL 227—The Middle Ages in World Cinema
- CMPL 250—Introduction to Methods in Comparative Literature
- CMPL 251—Introduction to Literary Theory
- CMPL 254—Horror and the Global Gothic
- CMPL 277—Myth, Fable, Novella: The Long History of the Short Story
- CMPL 452—The Middle Ages
- CMPL 453—The Erotic Middle Ages
- CMPL 474H—Cannibals, Kings, and Holy Men: Ethnography and Literature
- CMPL 478—The Medieval Frame Tale: Chaucer, Boccaccio, and the Arabian Nights
- CMPL 500—Advanced Seminar
- CMPL 621—Arthurian Romance
- CMPL 622—Medieval Cosmopolitanisms
- CMPL 890—Literature & Ecology in the Preindustrial World