UMass Boston

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Alex Mueller

Department:
English
Title:
Grad Prog Dir/Professor
Professor of English, Graduate Program Director, English MA
Location:
Wheatley Hall Floor 06 00003
Phone:
617.287.6723
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Biography

As a medievalist and pedagogy specialist, my work traces the public life of the English language within educational environments. During the Middle Ages, students and teachers worked from common books – often containing the Trojan texts of Virgil and Ovid – inscribed with Latin and vernacular marginalia that had been accumulating over time. The schoolbooks that survive from this era are so excessively overrun with glosses that it is often difficult to distinguish the texts from their commentaries. My work examines this sharing of textual space, which reflects an emphasis on collaborative and multilingual constructions of knowledge.

Area of Expertise

History of Rhetoric, History of the Book, Critical Pedagogy, Medieval Literature, Arthurian Romance

Degrees

PhD, University of Minnesota

Professional Publications & Contributions

Books, Published (Peer-Reviewed)

Articles/Book Chapters, Published and Forthcoming (Peer-Reviewed)

  • “Jack Spicer’s Grail in the Boston Public Library.” Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 46 (2019) [2021]. 31-56.
  • Co-author with Matthew Davis. “The Places of Writing on the Multimodal Page.” Writing Changes: Alphabetic Text and Multimodal Composition. Ed. Pegeen Reichert Powell. New York: Modern Language Association, 2020. 103-22.
  • “Stealing a Corpus: Appropriating Aesop’s Body in the Early Age of Print.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 12.2 (2018).
  • “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale: Entertainment versus Education.” The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales. Ed.     Candace Barrington, Brantley L. Bryant, Richard H. Godden, Daniel T. Kline, and Myra Seaman (September 2017). 
  • “Digitizing Chaucerian Debate.” Approaches to Teaching Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Ed. Frank Grady and Peter Travis. 2nd edition. New York: Modern Language Association, 2014. 196-9.
  • “A Prehistory of Resistance to Writing Across the Curriculum.” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 19.2 (Fall 2012): 117-42.
  • “Wikipedia as Imago Mundi.” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching 17.2 (Fall 2010): 11-25.
  • Co-author with Cheryl Nixon and Rajini Srikanth. “Constructing the Innocence of the First Textual Encounter.” Human Architecture 8.1 (Spring 2010): 1-16.
  • “The Historiography of the Dragon: Heraldic Violence in the Alliterative Morte Arthure.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 32 (2010): 295-324.
  • “The Medieval Writing Workshop.” The Once and Future Classroom 6.2 (Fall 2008). 
  • “Linking Letters: Translating Ancient History into Medieval Romance.” Literature Compass 4.4 (2007): 1017-29.
  • “‘The Soft Beauty of the Latin Word’: Experiencing Latin in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” Classical and Modern Literature 26.2 (Fall 2006): 179-96.
  • “Corporal Terror: Critiques of Imperialism in The Siege of Jerusalem.” Philological Quarterly 84.3 (Summer 2005): 287-310.
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