Synopsis:
I received my PhD in 1970 in the traditional, historically-oriented and comprehensive Program in Romance Philology at The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, under the inspiring direction of the legendary Urban Tigner Holmes. In those halcyon days, each of us in "the Holmes group" got several offers and ultimately chose the one we liked best. Therefore, I spent two pleasant years at the University of Missouri-Columbia before being invited to return to UNC-CH to work with Professor Holmes whose untimely death in 1972 made me, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, the héritier du programme at the beginning of my career.
Though shouldering a wide range of departmental and university responsibilities, both administrative and advisory, and having served as the General Editor of Romance Notes since 1991, I, working in concert with a number of highly qualified and excellent colleagues in French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish as well as with extra-departmental colleagues affiliated with the University's Medieval Studies Curriculum, have worked to maintain an extensive departmental program in medieval and philological studies here at UNC-CH. We are one of the few departments in the nation which currently offers a specialty in Romance Philology. In addition to my annual fall-semester introductory course in Old French, I offer on a biennial schedule courses in Vulgar Latin, Romance Paleography, Provençal, Old Italian and Minor and Median Romance Tongues (Catalan, Romontsch and Romanian). In conjunction my new colleague, Sahar Amer, I share courses in Old and Middle French Literature as well as French Medieval Drama. Over the years, I have directed MA theses and doctoral disserations in this department, and in the curricula of Comparative Literature as well as Linguistics, which range over an impossibly broad spectrum. Let it suffice to be said that the first of these was entitled "Magyar Lexical Borrowings in Romanian," and the most recent which I am co-directing with Dominique Fisher, my colleague in nineteenth-century studies, "Ecriture et rythme dans le corpus manuscrit des troubadours."
As with most romance philologists, my interests are ecclectic and frequently geared to those of my current students. Early on, I published a critical edition of Le Chastoiement d'un pére á son fils, an Old French version of the Disciplina clericalis of the eleventh-century Spanish converti Petrus Alphonsi. My current research effort lies in the preparation of the text volume of the music-text edition of the Chansonnier Laborde which I am preparing in conjunction with Professor Richard Wexler, a musicologist at the University of Maryland. |
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