Traugott Lawler
Professor Emeritus and lecturer in religion and literature
Prof. Lawler is Professor Emeritus of English at Yale; he taught a course on Dante's Divine Comedy at the Institute in spring of 2007. He has been writing in recent years mostly on William Langland, and has offered a graduate seminar on Langland six times since 1987. With four other scholars, he is working on a commentary on the poem in all its versions, and is the author recently of "Langland's Pardon-Formula: Its Ubiquity, Its Binary Shape, Its Silent Middle Term," in Yearbook of Language Studies 14, and "Langland and the Secular Clergy," in YLS 16. He is also the author of The One and the Many in the Canterbury Tales (1980) and co-editor of "Boece" for the Riverside Chaucer. He has regularly offered informal tutorials in Latin for graduate students preparing to meet the department's Latin requirement. In 1983 he was a Guggenheim Fellow. From 1986 to 1995 and again in 2002 to 2003, he served as Master of Ezra Stiles College. He retired in June, 2005 and is preparing, with other scholars, a commentary on the known versions of Piers Plowman, while continuing his research and remaining available to students. His other interests include Chaucer, Dante, medieval Latin, Old English, the history of the English language, and paleography. B.A., College of the Holy Cross; M.A., University of Wisconsin; PH.D., Harvard University.