Last year I was teaching at the University of Southern California, in the English department there. Before that, I was in graduate school at Stanford.

What classes did you teach at USC?

At USC, I was doing a mixture of teaching in the English department and the general education program. I taught English courses, both introductory courses and upper level courses in medieval and Renaissance literature.

How long are you planning on staying at Amherst?

This is my first year here; I was here last semester. I’ll definitely be here next year, and then after that we’ll see what Amherst needs and what my career aspirations are.

Could you tell us about your new course, “Medieval Love, Sex and Marriage”?

The idea of the class is to look at love, sex and marriage in the Middle Ages not only as interesting topics in their own right, because obviously their culture was very different, but also as ways of talking about and thinking about other issues and other kinds of relationships. I think a lot of people of the times used, for example, love to talk about power relationships. You couldn’t necessarily talk about in other contexts relationships between people and kings, or people and God. We’re talking about the ways love and sex become metaphors for other kinds of things.

What other classes are you teaching?

I’m doing half of my teaching in English and half in Russian. I’m teaching Russian language. Next fall, I’ll probably be teaching a new course called “Medieval Poetry and its Afterlives,” which will be looking at medieval poetry and how it’s been used, adapted, translated and distorted by later poets.

So you specialize in medieval literature?

My main field is medieval English literature. I tend to define that pretty broadly, so my sense of medieval literature also includes things such as 20th century poets looking back on medieval literature. In the 19th century there was a lot of interest, especially in England, in using the Middle Ages as a way of defining what it meant to be English. All of those kinds of things are interesting to me. It allows me to put my finger in a lot of different pies.