David Raybin
Eastern Illinois University
600 Lincoln Avenue
Charleston, IL 61920
Phone: (217) 581-6980
Fax: (217) 581-7209
Email: draybin@eiu.edu
The Seminar Directors
Susanna Fein is Professor of English at Kent State University. David Raybin is Professor of English at Eastern Illinois University. Our joint projects include editorship of The Chaucer Review: A Journal of Medieval Studies and Literary Criticism, two books on Chaucer—Rebels and Rivals (1991) and Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches (forthcoming 2008)—and a 2007 Study Abroad summer course in England that included students from both our schools. Each of us has a longstanding commitment to working with school teachers, and as humanists who are drawn to the communal study of poetry, we look forward to this seminar experience.
Statement by David Raybin: My interest in working with teachers is deep and long-established. In the autumn of 1987, freshly returned from an NEH Institute on Chaucer, I applied to the Illinois Humanities Council for support to organize a springtime conference for school teachers on the Canterbury Tales at Eastern Illinois University. I thought of the conference as a one-time event, a way to share my experiences with a larger community. As it turned out, I have now organized an annual EIU Literature Conference for almost twenty years. The distinguishing characteristic of each conference is a focus on understanding, discussing, and appreciating a major author and text. I find that working with teachers is satisfying and natural, perhaps for the simple reason that I am passionate about teaching. I have been granted EIU’s two principal teaching honors: the Distinguished Honors Faculty Award in 1993 and Faculty Laureate in 2002. Though I sometimes return to the medieval French studies that I studied as a graduate student at Columbia, Chaucer is the main focus of my scholarship. I am now editor of The Chaucer Review, and I teach and write about the Canterbury Tales regularly.
Statement by Susanna Fein: Teaching Chaucer is integral to my life, and it has been for thirty years, ever since I studied at Harvard with Larry D. Benson while the monumental Riverside Chaucer was in production under his editorship. I am now Editor of The Chaucer Review and an elected Trustee of the New Chaucer Society. I teach Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to undergraduates every spring term, and to graduate students on a regular basis. Early in my teaching career, in 1989, I co-directed an NEH-sponsored Institute for High School Teachers on the Canterbury Tales held in Aberdeen, South Dakota, and I have been working with teachers ever since. Some of my recent graduate classes (one on Chaucer, one on Arthurian texts) have enrolled many high school teachers, in part because my department maintains an active M.A. for teachers. At Kent State I am also the Coordinator of an undergraduate interdisciplinary minor in Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies. In my scholarly life, I conduct research on medieval literary manuscripts and their contents. I am often in England for my research in archives and for medieval conferences, and I am familiar with London and Canterbury.
