Bruce W. Holsinger is an American author, novelist, and an academic and literary scholar. Currently, he is professor of English at the University of Virginia.
Academic career
Bruce Holsinger, a professor at the University of Virginia, started a hashtag called #Thanks for typing, collecting a series of notes by men in academia thanking their wives for typing their manuscripts, but rarely including their names...revealing an archive of unpaid and unrecognised academic labor hidden in the acknowledgments section.[1][2]
He is considered an expert on the use of parchment in medieval English manuscript production,[3] and organized, with bioarchaeologists from the University of York, the research project into uterine vellum which established the precise composition for the material used in for the creation of the earliest bible manuscripts.[4]
Novelist
The New York Times described him as "gamekeeper turned poacher",[5] due to the fact that Holsinger, a professor[6] at the University of Virginia, specializing in medieval English literature, turned to writing fiction based around his academic interests.[5] His first novel was A Burnable Book in 2014.[7] This was set in fourteenth-century England during the reign of King Richard II, and has Holsinger's protagonist John Gower—at the instigation of Geoffrey Chaucer[note 1]—hunt down a supposedly revolutionary book, in which a series of poems predict the deaths of the kings of England.[5] One of the most prominent characters is one Edgar Rykener—who is in-universe also called Eleanor—a man who dresses as a woman and has sex for money. This inclusion, says Holsinger, is directly based on the real-life case of John Rykener, which also occurred in 1394, the year Holsinger sets the events of his book.[9][10]
Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror (Chicago, 2007)
The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (Chicago, 2005)
Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture (Stanford, 2001)
Notes
^It has been surmised that Gower and Chaucer were probably good friends; certainly close enough for Chaucer to grant Gower power of attorney in the 1370s, and to dedicate his Troilus and Criseyde of ten years or so later to him also, where Chaucer refers to "O moral Gower.".[8]
^The previous incumbents were Rita Felski and W. R. Kenan Jr.[6]
Holsinger, B. (2014). A Burnable Book. London: HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN978-0-00-749331-9.
Karras, R. M.; Linkinen, T. (2016). "John / Eleanor Rykener Revisited". In Doggett, L E.; O'Sullivan, D. E. (eds.). Founding Feminisms in Medieval Studies: Essays in Honor of E. Jane Burns. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. pp. 111–124. ISBN978-1-84384-427-3.