English Department Faculty

Joaquin Martinez Pizarro

Professor. Ph.D. Harvard University, 1976; Old English and Old Norse; Medieval Latin; early medieval narrative; historiography as literature.

2078 Humanities; T Th 11.30 - 12.30
631-632-7486

Courses:

Fall 2008

Old English Literature (EGL 300/510) T Th 3.50 - 5.10
Medieval Epic (EGL 374) T Th 2.20 -3.40

Selected Publications:

The King Says No: On the Logic of Type-Scenes in Late-Antique and Early-Medieval Narrative," in The Long Morning of the Middle Ages, eds. Michael McCormick and Jennifer Davis (forthcoming from Ashgate in 2008)
"Julian of Toledo's Historia Wambae regis," translated with an introduction and notes by Joaquin Martinez Pizarro Catholic University of America press, Washington, D.C., 2005
"Mixed Modes in Historical Narrative," in Narrative and History in the Early Medieval West. eds. Elizabeth M. Tyler and Ross Balzaretti. Turnhout (Brepols), 2006
"Poetry as Rumination: The Model for Bede's Caedmon," Neophilologus 89 (2005)
"Ethnic and National History CA. 500 - 1000," in Historiography in the Middle Ages, ed. Deborah Mauskopf Deliyannis. Brill: Leiden, 2003
"Kings in Adversity: A Note on Alfred and the Cakes." Neophilologus 80 (1996).
Writing Ravenna: The Liber Pontificalis of Andreas Agnellus. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 1995.
"Images of Church and State: Sulpicius Severus to Notker Balbulus." Journal of Medieval Latin 4 (1994).
"Bourdieu y la cultura del pueblo." Lienzo 14 (1993).
"Sobre oralidad y escritura." Lienzo 13 (1992).
"Woman-to-Man Senna." In Poetry in the Scandinavian Middle Ages. Atti del 12 congresso internazionale di studi sull'alto medioevo. Ed. Teresa Paroli. Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull'alto medioevo, 1990.
A Rhetoric of the Scene: Dramatic Narrative in the Early Middle Ages. Toronto: U of Toronto Press, 1989.

Works In Progress:

Representations of personal experience in the literature of fifth-century Gaul.

Although my graduate training was in early Germanic languages and literatures (Old English, Old Norse, medieval German), soon after completing my doctoral dissertation my interest shifted to the study of European literature in the period 500 - 1000 AD. Works from this period, which are in Latin, and much more numerous than we tend to think, have hardly been studied as literature. Scholars have used them as sources for history, philology, art history, etc., but there have been very few literary studies. I have published three books and a number of articles in this area.

At present I have moved back into the fifth century, the century in which the Western empire ceased to be, whether it "fell," or mutated, or was transformed. I have started work on what might become a study of three writers who lived through the end of the empire and the beginning of the new (medieval or proto-medieval) era in Gaul. All three wrote from their personal experience, though in an impersonal, highly artificial Roman manner. It is a challenging subject, and seems more difficult now than when I first thought of it.