Research and Teaching Interests:

Poetry in English from all periods and areas, with particular focus on medieval English poetry, especially Beowulf and Chaucer's works.

Chickering teaches first-year courses in English (novels, poems, plays) and courses in Chaucer, Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and Beowulf, and occasionally Shakespeare. He also teaches The Grammar of English with Prof. Michele Barale, and an interdisciplinary course in twelfth-century medieval French literature and history (in translation) with Prof. Fredric Cheyette of the History Department.

Selected Publications:

Chickering is best known for his Beowulf: A Dual-Language Edition (Doubleday Anchor, 1977), which includes the Old English text and a translation into modern English verse, with Introduction, Commentary, and Glosses to Select Passages. A third edition with Supplement will appear in the Spring of 2006.

Other representative publications include "Unpunctuating Chaucer," The Chaucer Review, 25:2 (1990), 96-109; "Lyric Time in Beowulf," Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 91:4 (October, 1992), 489-509; "Hearing Ariel's Songs," The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24:1 (1994), 131-172; "Comic Meter and Rhyme in the Miller's Tale," Chaucer Yearbook, 2 (1995), 17-47; "The Poetry of Suffering in Book V of Troilus," The Chaucer Review 34:3 (2000), 243-268.

Recent publications: "Beowulf and 'Heaneywulf,'" The Kenyon Review 24:1 (Winter 2002), 160-178; (with Fredric Cheyette) "Love, Anger, and Peace: Social Practice and Poetic Play in the Ending of Yvain," Speculum 80:1 (2005), 75-117.

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Updated October 2005