Tim Machan Lecture, professor of English, Marquette University
Machan received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests focus on medieval literature and language, in particular social anxieties associated with change and variation in the history of English, as well as the ways in which language uses in literature and everyday settings relate to one another, and in the relations between the disciplines of linguistics and literary studies. He has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers. In addition to numerous articles and edited collections, his books include Techniques of Translation: Chaucer’s “Boece” (Pilgrim Books, 1985), Textual Criticism and Middle English Texts (Blackwell, 2004), English in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2003), and Language Anxiety: Conflict and Change in the History of English (Oxford, 2009). His latest book, under contract with Oxford (expected 2013), is “What Is English, and Why Do We Care?”