Ardis Butterfield appointed the Marie Borroff Professor of English
Ardis Butterfield, newly named as the Marie Borroff Professor of English, conducts her research on Chaucer and nationhood; bilingualism and medieval linguistic identities; the literatures and music of France and England from the 13th to 15th centuries; continental and insular vernacular manuscripts and the relationships between them; city writing; the medieval lyric; and theories and histories of language, form, and genre. With secondary appointments as professor of French and music, her scholarship distinctively traverses disciplines.
Butterfield studied at Trinity College, Cambridge where she received a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. She also attended the University of Bristol, graduating with an M.A. in medieval English. Butterfield held teaching positions at Cambridge and University College London before coming to Yale in 2012 as professor of English. Her visiting appointments include periods at the University of Virginia, the Huntington Library, San Marino and All Souls College, Oxford. She will spend 2018-19 as a visiting fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and senior research fellow at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge.
Butterfield’s books include the prize-winning “The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and the Nation in the Hundred Years War” and “Poetry and Music in Medieval France.” She edited “Chaucer and the City,” a collection of essays inspired by her undergraduate course on “London in Literature” and “Performing Medieval Text”, with Henry Hope and Pauline Souleau (2017). She is currently engaged in three projects: a new edition of medieval English lyrics for W.W. Norton & Company; a book on lyric form in the middle ages, “Living Form: The Origins of Medieval Song”; and a biography, “Chaucer: A London Life”. Butterfield has contributed numerous articles, chapters, and reviews to edited volumes and journals across the disciplines of English, French, and music.
The Yale professor co-founded The Medieval Song Network, a collaborative, international project to encourage new interdisciplinary research on the medieval lyric. At Yale, she also co-founded the Medieval Song Lab, a forum for cross-disciplinary research on medieval song, and is leading a research team at Yale to develop a new Digital Archive of Medieval Song.
Butterfield is an elected fellow of the English Association and was twice awarded Leverhulme Trust fellowships. She won the R.H. Gapper Prize by the Society for French Studies for her book, “The Familiar Enemy.” She contributes widely as editor and advisor to international book series, journals, and research grant networks, and has just completed a term as president of the New Chaucer Society. Butterfield has given keynote addresses at numerous conferences across the globe, in the United States, France, Switzerland, Canada, Korea, and the United Kingdom, among other countries.
