Professor
Teaching Areas: Young People’s Literature, Arthurian and Speculative Fiction
My areas of research and teaching include popular fictions (in a variety of media) about King Arthur, primarily those produced since the mid-nineteenth century; young people’s literature, with a special interest in Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery and twentieth- and twenty-first-century fantasy fiction; and speculative fiction, with a special interest in feminist fantasy, including rewritings of fairy tales. I am happy to supervise students in any of these areas.
My most recent major research project has been co-editing a book on medievalism and neo-Victorianism with my colleague in the department, Martin Danahay. The collection of essays, Neo Victorianism and Medievalism: Re Appropriating the Victorian and Medieval Pasts (Brill, 2024), brings together for the first time scholars of neo-Victorianism and medievalism. The similarities of the two fields are explored in the introduction (Danahay and Howey), while individual essays take on a variety of subjects, from political uses of neo-Victorianism and medievalism to their appearance in popular television, film, children’s literature and fiction. My own essay, “Medieval Knights and Mighty Young Men,” compares the use of medievalism in constructing ideal masculinity for boys in Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe (1853), Rodman Philbrick’s Freak the Mighty (1993), and the latter’s film adaptation, The Mighty (1998).
My most recent monograph, Afterlives of the Lady of Shalott and Elaine of Astolat (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), works at the intersection of feminism, adaptation studies, medievalism studies, and Arthurian literature. It investigates representations of the Lady of Shalott and Elaine of Astolat, tracing their emergence in medieval literature, their adaptation in Tennyson’s poems, and their subsequent appearance in music, art, and literature of various genres. This project was awarded a SSHRC Standard Research Grant (2009-2012) in its early development and after publication was awarded The 2022 Inaugural Dhira B. Mahoney Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Book in Arthurian Studies by the International Arthurian Society-North American Branch.
Current Courses:
Engl 2P01 Critical Reading, Writing and Research (fall 2024)
Engl 2P10 Young People’s Literature to 1914 (fall 2024)
Engl 3V01 Twentieth-Century Young People’s Fantasy (winter 2025)
Engl 4P72 King Arthur in Literature for Young People (winter 2025)
Selected Publications:
Becoming a Man in Narnia: Adaptation, Medievalism, and Masculinity in Prince Caspian. Studies in Medievalism, vol. 34. Forthcoming.
Neo Victorianism and Medievalism: Re Appropriating the Victorian and Medieval Pasts, edited by Martin A. Danahay and Ann F. Howey, Neo-Victorian Series 9, Brill, 2024. (See https://brill.com/display/title/62983?rskey=OsF8G9&result=3)
Introduction: Neo-Victorianism and Medievalism—Why Together? Why Now? (Co-authored with Martin A. Danahay, in Neo-Victorianism and Medievalism)
Medieval Knights and Mighty Young Men (in Neo‑Victorianism and Medievalism)
The Mystery of History: To Say Nothing of the Dog as Neo-Victorian Fiction. Neo-Victorian Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, 2021/2022, pp. 113-34. https://neovictorianstudies.com/article/view/339/325. (appeared June 2023).
Afterlives of the Lady of Shalott and Elaine of Astolat. Arthurian and Courtly Cultures series. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. (See https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-47690-8) Awarded The 2022 Inaugural Dhira B. Mahoney Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Book in Arthurian Studies by the IAS-NAB.
Arthur and Adaptation. Arthuriana (Special Issue in Honour of Elizabeth Sklar, guest edited by Amy Kaufman), vol. 25, no. 4, Winter 2015, pp. 36-50.
Secular or Spiritual: Rereading Anne of Green Gables. Christianity and Literature, vol. 62, no. 3, Spring 2013, pp. 251-72.
Famous in Song and Story: Arthurian Legends in Heather Dale’s Music. Arthuriana, vol. 22, no. 2, Summer 2012, pp. 3-20.
A Bibliography of Modern Arthuriana 1500-2000. Co-authored with Stephen R. Reimer, D. S. Brewer, 2006.
Rewriting the Women of Camelot: Arthurian Popular Fiction and Feminism. Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy 93, Greenwood Press, 2001.
A fabulous site for Arthurian material is The Camelot Project Website edited by Alan Lupack.
