Nicole Guenther Discenza

Nicole Guenther Discenza
Associate Professor

Contact

Office: CPR 301E
Phone: 813/974-1887
Email:

Bio

My teaching and research focus on Old and Middle English. I greatly enjoy teaching Old English, whether in the original language for graduate courses on Alfredian Prose and Beowulf, or in translation for undergraduate surveys. My research focuses primarily on the Old English works of Alfred the Great and his circle. My book, The King’s English: Strategies of Translation in the Old English Boethius (State U of New York P, 2005), explores how Alfred's translation of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy exposed Anglo-Saxon elites to classical learning and Christian thought; inculcated specific values; and brought prestige to its translator and his dialect. My recent articles include “Alfred the Great’s Boethius,” Literature Compass 3 (2006); “The Paradox of Humility in the Alfredian Translations” (Studia Neophilologica, 2004); “The Old English Bede and the Construction of Anglo-Saxon Authority” (Anglo-Saxon England, 2002); and “Wealth and Wisdom: Symbolic Capital and the Ruler in the Translational Program of Alfred the Great” (Exemplaria, 2001). My electronic publications treat “The Unauthorized Biographies of Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius” (The Alfredian Boethius Project) and “The Sources of King Alfred’s Old English Version of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae” (2001; Fontes Anglo-Saxonici: World Wide Web Register), and my chapters in books include “The Persuasive Power of Alfredian Prose” (Readings in Medieval Texts: Interpreting Old and Middle English Literature, Oxford UP, 2004) and “The Influence of Gregory the Great on the Alfredian Social Imaginary” (Rome and the North: The Early Reception of Gregory the Great in Germanic Europe, Peeters, 2001). My latest book project, “A Boss on the Shield of the Universe,” focuses on Anglo-Saxon cosmology and geography, a study I began with “A Map of the Universe: Geography and Cosmology in the Program of Alfred the Great” (forthcoming in Essays in Anglo-Saxon Studies, vol. 1: Conversion and Colonization in Anglo-Saxon England, ACMRS P, expected 2006).

Middle English and Old French also fascinate me. I teach a variety of medieval texts in undergraduate surveys and more specialized courses (“Chaucer,” “Love and Lust in Medieval and Early Modern Europe”).  My graduate courses focus on individual writers (“The Pearl-Poet”) and genres (“Middle English Romance”). I have an essay in progress titled “Abjection and the Monster Within: Malory’s Balin,” and my “Dialectical Structure in Chrétien de Troyes’s Cligés” appeared in Romance Languages Annual (1996). I take an interdisciplinary approach to Medieval Studies; I have taught “Medieval Latin” and “Life in the Fourteenth Century,” and I employ contemporary theory to inform my study of medieval texts—and medieval texts to complicate my understanding of contemporary theory.

Current Courses