Elizabeth Edwards

BA, MA (Dal), PhD (Cantab)

Professor Elizabeth B. Edwards was jointly appointed to the Contemporary Studies and Foundation Year programs. She obtained her BA and MA degrees at Dalhousie University, and completed her PhD at Cambridge University in 1997, focusing in her thesis on Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur. She began teaching at King’s College, as a tutor in the Foundation Year Program, in 1990 becoming Assistant Professor in 1997, Associate Professor in 2000 and  Professor in 2009. She is a founding faculty member and past Director of the Contemporary Studies Program, and held the position of Vice President of the University from July 2001 – June 2006. Dr. Edwards is appointed as adjunct Professor to the Dalhousie Department of English. She is a past President of the Canadian Society of Medievalists. Her research interests combine medieval literature and contemporary critical theory. Her classes in Contemporary Studies include Pain, Home and Homelessness, The Theory of the Gift, and Freud, Lacan and the Critique of Psychoanalysis.

Current Research Projects

The Work of Mourning and the Language of Grief in Middle English Literature.

Selected Publications

Book

• The Genesis of Narrative in Malory’s Morte Darthur, Boydell and Brewer, Woodbridge, Sussex, 2001.

Articles

• “Thinking Indigeneity: A Challenge to Medieval Studies” Exemplaria (forthcoming 2021).
• “Hospitality in Malory.” Arthurian Literature (forthcoming 2021).
• “Michel Deguy’s English.” Dalhousie French Studies (2019).
•  “Money and Literature” in Money and Coinage in the Middle Ages, ed. Rory Naismith, Brill, 2019.
• “The Cheerful Science: Nicholas Oresme and Literary Dissemination” Middle English and Latin Literature: Festschrift for Jill Mann, ed. Christopher Cannon and Maura Nolan, Brewer and Boydell (2010)
• “The Work of Mourning and Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale” Exemplaria 20.4 (Winter 2008) 361-384
• “Spectres that Cannot Not Spook: Work, Fear and Mourning in Specters of Marx” Dalhousie French Studies 82 (Spring, 2008) 107-121.
• “The Economics of Justice in Chaucer’s Miller’s and Reeve’s Tales.” The Dalhousie Review 82 (2002): 91-112 [Special Medieval Issue.]
• “The Banal Profound and the Profoundly Banal: Andy Warhol.” In Between Ethics and Aesthetics: Crossing the Boundaries, edited by Dorota Glowacka and Stephen Boos, SUNY Press, 2002: 255-274.
• “The Place of Women in Malory’s Morte Darthur” in A Companion to Malory, E. Archibald and A.S.G. Edwards, eds. Boydell and Brewer, 1995.

Interests

Middle English Literature, Literary and Critical Theory, Psychoanalysis, Derrida.