Lee Manion

Lee Manion
Associate Professor; Director of Undergraduate Studies
224 Tate Hall
884-8650
Education

Ph.D. University of Virginia

B.A. Duke University

Research and Teaching

Medieval and early modern English and Scottish literature; narrative and form; political thought and sovereignty; crusading literature; romance and epic

Lee Manion received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. He is a winner of the William T. Kemper Award for Teaching Excellence and the 2021 MU A&S Associate Professor of the Year Award. His first book, Narrating the Crusades: Loss and Recovery in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge UP, 2014), which analyzes medieval crusading romances and their influence on Renaissance authors such as Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare, won the NeMLA Book Award. His second book project, The Recognition of Sovereignty: Politics of Empire in Early Anglo-Scottish Literature, examines literature's influence on theories of sovereignty in England and Scotland from the medieval to the early modern period. In 2013-14 he was an NEH fellow at the National Humanities Center. His article "The Loss of the Holy Land and Sir Isumbras: Literary Contributions to Fourteenth-Century Crusade Discourse" won the Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize for best first article in the field of medieval studies from the Medieval Academy in 2012. He has also received an Institute of Historical Research Mellon Fellowship and is a contributing editor to The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (for Cambridge University Press). His teaching interests include romance, Chaucer, Middle Scots verse and prose, Shakespeare, Spenser, Wroth, and topics in legal and political thought.

Courses Taught: 

ENGL 8220: Resistance, Rebellion, and Revolution in Premodern Britain

ENGL 4996: Honors Seminar in English

ENGL 2200H: Troy: History and Myth

ENGL 4167/7167: Shakespeare: Tragedies and Romances

ENGL 4210: Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

ENGL 8210: Crusading in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

ENGL 3110: Arthurian Legends, Past and Present

ENGL 4166/7166: Shakespeare: Comedies and Histories

ENGL 4106/7106: Medieval and Renaissance Romance

ENGL 4970: Senior Capstone

ENGL 4166/7166: Chaucer and Spenser

ENGL 3200: Survey of British Literature, Beginnings to 1784

Awards and Honors

William T. Kemper Fellow, 2023

MU Arts & Science Associate Professor of the Year, 2021

Kircher Faculty Fellowship, 2021

Davidson Faculty Fellowship, 2018

MU Arts & Science Faculty Fellowship, 2015-16

MU Research Council Summer Research Grant, 2015

NEH Fellowship at the National Humanities Center, 2013-14

NeMLA Book Award, 2013

Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize, Medieval Academy of America, 2012

Selected Publications

“The Crusading Romance in Britain: Religious Violence and the Transformation of Popular Chivalric Narratives,” The New Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. Roberta L. Krueger (Cambridge UP, 2023), pp. 101-18

“Scottish Narratives of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages: Re-Imagining 'Fredome',” Scottish Literary Review 11.2 (2019): 1-24

“Renaissance Crusading Literature: Memory, Translation, and Adaptation,” The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the Crusades, ed. Anthony Bale (Cambridge UP, 2019), pp. 232-47

“The Crusading Romance in Early Modern England: Converting the Past in Berners's Huon of Bordeaux and Johnson's Seven Champions of Christendom,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 48.3 (2018): 491-517

“Thinking Through the English Crusading Romance: Sir Gowther and the Baltic,” Thinking Medieval Romance, ed. Katherine Little and Nicola McDonald (Oxford UP, 2018), pp. 68-90

“'Perpetuel Memorye': Remembering History in the Crusading Romance,” Remembering the Crusades and Crusading, ed. Megan Cassidy-Welch (Routledge, 2016), pp. 114-28 

Narrating the Crusades: Loss and Recovery in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge UP, 2014)

"Sovereign Recognition: Contesting Political Claims in the Alliterative Morte Arthure and The Awntyrs off Arthur," Law and Sovereignty in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Robert Sturges (Brepols, 2011), pp. 69-91

"The Loss of the Holy Land and Sir Isumbras: Literary Contributions to Fourteenth-Century Crusade Discourse," Speculum 85.1 (2010): 65-90