David Coley

Education

• BA (Connecticut College)
• MA (Pennsylvania)
• PhD (Maryland)

Biography

David Coley’s most recent book, Death and the Pearl Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England (Ohio State, 2019), was awarded the 2020 Margaret Wade Labarge Prize for best book in medieval studies by the Canadian Society of Medievalists. The book considers submerged discourses of plague in fourteenth-century English poetry, especially the poems of MS Cotton Nero A.x. David’s earlier monograph, The Wheel of Language: Representing Speech in Middle English Poetry, 1377-1422 (Syracuse, 2012), posits the representation of the spoken word within later medieval English poetry as a powerful and efficacious act that both critiqued and created social, political, and religious realities. David’s articles have appeared in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, The Chaucer Review, Exemplaria, Glossator, and Florilegium, and he is a contributor to several edited volumes, including The Cambridge Companion to the Canterbury Tales (2020), Approaches to Teaching the Middle English Pearl (MLA, 2018), and Premodern Ecologies in the Modern Literary Imagination (Toronto, 2019).