Faculty Profiles

Julie Nelson Couch

Julie Nelson Couch specializes in Middle English literature, manuscript studies, cultural game theory, and the modern reception of medieval literature. She has published on the manuscript context of Middle English romances and “Childhood of Christ” poems, on the agency of child characters in the Middle English Amis and Amiloun and Havelok the Dane, on Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur, and on Howard Pyle's retellings of King Arthur and Robin Hood stories. Dr. Nelson Couch has also edited two Marian miracle tales, “The Christian Child Slain by Jews,” and “The Jewish Boy” two “cultural artifacts” of the persecution of Jews in medieval England. Dr. Nelson Couch is currently finalizing a book, with Kimberly K. Bell, that combines medieval manuscript study with contemporary cultural game theory to show how the romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight launches a multidimensional game with the reader. 

Ryan Hackenbracht

Ryan Hackenbracht (Ph.D. Pennsylvania State University, 2012) specializes in early modern British poetry, prose, and drama. His current book project, National Reckonings: The Last Judgment and National Identity in Milton's England, examines the relationship between nationhood, eschatology, and literary form and genre during the English Revolution and Restoration. His research interests include: Milton and early modern poetry, the English Revolution, Thomas Hobbes and political philosophy, Henry Vaughan and royalist writing, book history and print culture, apocalypticism, and religion and literature. He is a recipient of the Albert C. Labriola Award from the Milton Society of America, and his work has recently appeared in Studies in Philology and Renaissance and Reformation.

Matt Hunter

Matt Hunter (Ph.D. Yale, 2016) specializes in early modern poetry and drama. His first book, The Pursuit of Style in Early Modern Drama: Forms of Talk on the London Stage (Cambridge University Press, 2022), argues that the plays of Shakespeare and hist contemporaries cultivated different styles of talk for audiences to imitate in their off-stage conversations. He has also co-edited the essay collection Publicity and the Early Modern Stage: People Made Public (Palgrave, 2021), as well as Norton's Second Critical Edition of Doctor Faustus (Norton, 2023). Articles from his research have appeared in ELH, Representations, English Literary Renaissance, and other venues. His next project is about Shakespearean tragedy and the language of suffering.

Brian McFadden

Brian McFadden (Ph.D. Notre Dame, 1999) studies the social and historical importance of miracles, monsters, and marvels in Anglo-Saxon literature, as well as medievalism in modern literature. He has edited a special issue of Religion and Literature on medieval depictions of the other world and has published articles on Beowulf, The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History, the Liber Monstrorum, Physiologus and The Phoenix, the Old English lives of St. Margaret, J.R.R. Tolkien's use of Anglo-Saxon monster lore, and the Exeter Book riddles in their tenth-century context. He is currently working on a book on the tenth-century context of the Beowulf MS, an article on Robert Zemeckis's animated film Beowulf, and two articles on medieval science and philosophy in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series.