David Coley

Education

• BA (Connecticut College)
• MA (Pennsylvania)
• PhD (Maryland)

Biography

David Coley’s most recent book, "Death and the Pearl Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England" (Ohio State, 2019), was awarded the 2020 Margaret Wade Labarge Prize for best book in medieval studies by the Canadian Society of Medievalists. The book considers submerged discourses of plague in fourteenth-century English poetry, especially the poems of MS Cotton Nero A.x. David’s earlier monograph, "The Wheel of Language: Representing Speech in Middle English Poetry, 1377-1422" (Syracuse, 2012), posits the representation of the spoken word within later medieval English poetry as a powerful and efficacious act that both critiqued and created social, political, and religious realities. David’s articles have appeared in "Studies in the Age of Chaucer, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology", "The Chaucer Review", "Exemplaria", "Glossator", and "Florilegium", and he is a contributor to several edited volumes, including "Chaucer and Trauma" (Penn State, forthcoming 2025), "The Cambridge Companion to the Canterbury Tales" (2020), "Premodern Ecologies in the Modern Literary Imagination" (Toronto, 2019), and "Approaches to Teaching the Middle English Pearl" (MLA, 2018). In collaboration with Dr. Matthew Hussey, David is co-creator of "The Canterbury Fails", a biweekly podcast dedicated to reading marginal, minor, and absolutely unread Old and Middle English literature (and pairing that literature with thematically appropriate cocktails).