BAYLOR
PROFESSOR
SPOKE AT THE STONY BROOK SCHOOL
Distinguished professor of Literature and Humanities, Baylor University Honors College, David L. Jeffrey, spoke on The Canterbury Tales as part of the Pierson Curtis Lecture Series at The Stony Brook School in Carson Auditorium, 1 Chapman Parkway, Stony Brook on Tuesday, March 11, 2008, at 7:30 p.m.
Jeffrey received his PhD from Princeton University in 1968 and his BA from Wheaton College in 1965. His scholarly interests include the Bible in/as Literature; Historical Hermeneutics; Literature and Christian Spirituality; Medieval Literature; Literary and Art Historical relations; and Intellectual and Religious Foundations of Literary Modernism.
Jeffrey was previously the Chair of the English department at the University of Victoria and at the University of Ottowa. Jeffrey has also taught at the University of Rochester and University of Hull (U.K.). He has been a visiting faculty member at Notre Dame and at Regent College (U.B.C.). In 1996, Jeffrey was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Conference on Christianity and Literature and in 2004 he gave the Andrew Lang Lecture at St. Andrews University in Scotland.
Jeffrey is general editor and co-author of A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature (1992). Among his other books are The Early English Lyric and Franciscan Spirituality (1975); By Things Seen: Reference and Recognition in Medieval Thought (1979); Chaucer and Scriptural Tradition (1984); English Spirituality in the Age of Wesley (1987; 1994; 2000); The Law of Love: English Spirituality in the Age of Wyclif (1988; 2001); and People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture (1996). In 1990, with Brian J. Levy, he published a critical edition with accompanying translations from the medieval French, The Anglo-Norman Lyric, and in 1999, with Dominic Manganiello, he edited and co-authored Rethinking the Future of the University (1999). In 2003 he published a book on biblical literature and its critical tradition in literary and cultural theory, Houses of the Interpreter: Reading Scripture, Reading Culture. His edition of The Poetry of William Cowper was published in 2006.
He has three times (1975; 1992; 1996) been recipient of the CCL Book of the Year Award, and at the Modern Language Association convention in 2003 received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Conference on Christianity and Literature.
His current projects include a chapter on the relationship between biblical hermeneutics and literary theory for The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, a book on Augustine's aesthetics, a critical edition of the fourteenth-century spiritual writer Richard Rolle, and an historically-based theological commentary on the Gospel of Luke.
Jeffrey and his wife, Katherine, reside in Texas. They have five children and several grandchildren. One of Jeffrey's sons, Bruce Jeffrey, is a faculty member at The Stony Brook School.
