Christopher Cannon works on medieval literature and, in particular, the emergence of “English literature” as a meaningful category. He has traced that emergence conceptually (in the intellectual contexts in which it developed), philologically (in the history of English), and comparatively (as Latin learning produced a “grammatical” English and its poetics).
He is the co-editor of The Sound of Writing (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023) and the author of From Literacy to Literature: England, 1300–1400 (Oxford University Press, 2016), Middle English Literature: A Cultural History (Polity Press, 2008), The Grounds of English Literature (Oxford University Press, 2008), and The Making of Chaucer’s English: A Study of Words (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
He is general co-editor of Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture (a monograph series) and of the Oxford Chaucer. He has held a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and has received the William Riley Parker Prize from the MLA (2014). He came to Johns Hopkins in 2017 after teaching at NYU, Cambridge, Oxford, and UCLA.
