Lee Manion

Visiting Assistant Professor of English

Ph.D. University of Virginia
B.A. Duke University

Office: 308F Independence Hall
Phone: 401-874-6950
E-Mail: leemanion@mail.uri.edu
Office Hours: Tue/Thur 11:00 - 12:15 pm or by appt.

Professor Manion’s areas of interest include late medieval English literature, the crusades, heraldry, the history of medieval England’s political and legal ties to the continent, and philosophy (both medieval and modern). He studied English and the Classics at Duke University before attending graduate school at the University of Virginia, where he wrote a dissertation entitled,  “ ‘In another kynde’: Modes of Recognition in Late Medieval English Literature.”

Professor Manion’s current research project grows out of the dissertation, which examined changes in the concept of recognition across literary genres and disciplines in the medieval period. The book traces innovative developments in the representation of recognition in medieval philosophy, political theory, and rhetoric as they were variously deployed and scrutinized in literary texts such as Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, the alliterative Morte Arthure, and Langland’s Piers Plowman. The project’s aim is to provide a fuller history of changes in cognitive habits and the sub-discourses of recognition that played a role in shaping identity and community. Manion is also currently at work on another project, which developed out of his time as a Mellon Dissertation Fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research in 2005-6 at the University of London, which discusses formulations of crusade history in the medieval English romance.

Before arriving at URI in the fall of 2007, Professor Manion taught British literature and composition courses at Suffolk University, as well as courses on Shakespeare’s tragedies, on literary genres, and on medieval and renaissance literature at the University of Virginia. He looks forward to teaching courses on Chaucer, alliterative poetry, the Arthurian legend to the present, the history of rhetoric or literary criticism, and the medieval romance.