Researchers Study Native American, Medieval Writing
Marie Balsley Taylor joined the department this year as an assistant professor in early-American and Native American literature. Her research examines the role that Indigenous people, places, and practices played in shaping the 17th century colonial literary genres.
Indigenous Kinship, Colonial Texts, and the Contested Space of Early New England, her first book, was published in 2023 as part of the Native Americans of the Northeast Series with the University of Massachusetts Press. Taylor has also published articles on the early New England Quakers, the role of Indigenous diplomacy in the Puritan Colonial Indian Mission, and the relationship between kinship and Indigenous archives in the digital age.
Her current project is a scholarly edition of two early Puritan missionary tracts that chronicle missionary attempts to convert native people.
Taylor earned a Master of Arts degree in English literature at Georgetown University and a PhD in English literature at Purdue University. Before joining the department, she was an assistant professor at the University of North Alabama. She has also taught at the Oglala Lakota College in Rapid City, South Dakota, and at the Indian University of North America, located at Crazy Horse Memorial in South Dakota.
At UT she will teach undergraduate and graduate courses in early-American and Native American literature.
Also joining the department this year as an associate professor is R. D. (Ryan) Perry, who specializes in medieval and early modern literature.
Perry’s book Coterie Poetics and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition: Chaucer to Spencer, which was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, traces how the biographical links between poets who bridged the medieval and early modern periods appear formally in their work, and how these relationships were abstracted to create the English literary tradition.
In addition, Perry has co-edited essay collections on the medieval poet Charles d’Orléans, the literary history of the Hundred Years War, and modern intellectuals engaging with the Middle Ages.
After earning his MA in English at the University of Georgia and his PhD in English and in medieval studies with a designated emphasis in critical theory at the University of California, Berkeley, he taught as an assistant professor at the University of Denver.
At UT, Perry will teach undergraduate and graduate courses in Geoffrey Chaucer, medieval literature, and other topics in literature and critical theory. Among the courses he would like to teach, he has developed a 100-level course that looks at representations of sports in poetry, drama, short fiction, novels, film, television and/or other media.