Sylvia Tomasch, English
Associate University Dean of Academic Affairs, Macaulay Honors College
sylvia.tomasch@mhc.cuny.edu
212-729-2918
At the Honors College since 2005, Associate University Dean of Academic Affairs Sylvia Tomasch is also Professor of English at Hunter College, where she chaired the department in 2002-05. A past president of the Medieval Club of New York, Dr. Tomasch served five years on the Executive Committee of the Chaucer Division of the Modern Language Association (Chair, 2005-06), and is in the midst of a five-year term on the Executive Committee of the Comparative Medieval Division (2007-11).
Her scholarly interests include surveillance studies, medieval literature, especially Middle English and Chaucer, historical cartography, medieval antisemitism, and the history of the discipline of Medieval Studies. Recent publications include the articles “Professionalizing Chaucer: John Matthews Manly, Edith Rickert, and the Canterbury Tales as Cultural Capital”” and “Editing as Palinode: The Invention of Love and The Text of The Canterbury Tales”; two reprinted articles, “Postcolonial Chaucer and the Virtual Jew” and “Mappae Mundi and ‘The Knight’s Tale’: The Cartography of Power, The Technology of Control”; and two co-edited volumes of essays, Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages (which also contains two articles by her, “Introduction: Geographical Desire” and “Judecca, Dante’s Satan, and the Dis-placed Jew”) and The Performance of Middle English Culture: Essays on Chaucer and the Drama in Honor of Martin Stevens.
When she’s not spending her summer hiking in Ireland or excavating million-year-old fossils in Spain, Dr. Tomasch is working on a cultural biography of John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert and has begun a new project on Surveillance Studies and Medieval Practice.
