Nick Havely

Profile

Biography

Nick Havely taught in the Department from 1971 to 2011. He has produced scholarly editions of Chaucer's Friar's, Summoner's and Pardoner's Tales (1975), Chaucer's House of Fame (1994, 2nd edition 2013) and (with Helen Phillips) Chaucer's Dream Poetry (1997), together with a number of articles and chapters on Chaucer. He has taught at Oxford as well as York, and in 1977-8 he was Associate Visiting Professor in the English Department at Cornell University. His published work on Italian trecento poetry began with a volume of translations: Chaucer's Boccaccio: Sources for Troilus and the Knight's and Franklin's Tales (1980; reissued 1992). This was followed by a number of articles and chapters on Dante and the reception of Dante, then by a collection of edited essays: Dante's Modern Afterlife: Reception and Response from Blake to Heaney (1998) and a monograph on Dante and the Franciscans: Poverty and the Papacy in the 'Commedia' (2004), for which he was awarded an AHRC research grant.

His other publications include chapters on 14th-century Italian, French and English literature for The New Cambridge Medieval History vol. 6 (2000); and on 'The Italian Background' for Chaucer: An Oxford Guide (2005). He is author of an introduction to Dante in the Blackwell Guides to Literature series (2007) and editor of two recent volumes of essays: Dante in the Nineteenth Century: Reception, Canonicity, Popularization (2011); and Dante in the Long Nineteenth Century: Nationality, Identity, and Appropriation. In 2007-8 he was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for work leading to a monograph on Dante's British Public: Readers and Texts,  from the Fourteenth Century to the Present (Oxford University Press, 2014; re-issued in paperback 2017), which deals with a wide range of writing (criticism, translation, polemic, journals, letters, annotations, catalogues of collections) reflecting the presence of and conversation about Dante in Britain over the course of nearly seven centuries. In 2012 he was elected as a member of the Oxford Dante Society, and in 2014 his work on travellers and the human history of the Apennines was supported by the award of a Fellowship at the Fondazione Bogliasco (Genoa). Over the past ten years he has continued to give invited lectures and keynote addresses at universities, learned societies and conferences at, for example: Basel, Bologna, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Krakòw, London, Manchester, Melbourne, Mumbai, Oxford, Pisa, and St Andrews.

Research

Projects

Ongoing research include a book with the provisional title of Apennine Crossings: Journeys on the Edge of Tuscany which follows itineraries through the human history of the mountains of central Italy - from medieval clerics through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tourists to the multi-ethnic combatants of World War II.

I am also co-editing a new translation of Dante's Purgatorio by contemporary poets and am leading an international project on Dante Beyond Borders,which will produce a collection of essays on contexts and reception by members of American, British and German-speaking Dante Societies.  My essay on  'Transnational Dantes' for the Modern Language Association of America's Approaches to Teaching Dante's 'Divine Comedy' is forthcoming in 2018.

Supervision

At York I supervised PhD projects on a wide variety of topics, for example: The writing of civic history in 14th- and 15th-century London and York; Youth and Masculinity in Tudor Interludes; Royal Pardons in the 14th century; Women's life writing in colonial Kenya; Rurality in medieval and renaissance literature; Reception of Dante in the 19th century; Chaucer and Medieval Optics; Joyce and Dante.

Teaching

Undergraduate

My teaching for the Department of English and Related Literature has covered a broad span, from medieval English and Italian literature through to twentieth- and twenty first-century texts.

Postgraduate

In MA teaching at the Centre for Medieval Studies, my work has also ranged widely, including not only late medieval English but also England's relationship to Continental Europe and the work of major European writers of the period, such as Dante and Chaucer.