Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow
B.A., Cornell University, 2004
M.Phil., Yale University, 2008
Ph.D., Yale University, 2011
Matthew Vernon is a scholar of medieval literature whose teaching and research interests emphasize discovering points of contact between the Middle Ages and later periods. His points of entry into this subject include the themes of migration, genealogy, race and vernacularity in addition to historical inquiry. His research follows some problems with the idea of literary inheritance: the invisible accretion of ideas through time and how writers engage or resist the work of earlier generations. As part of this inquiry, he considers the question of how meaning is generated collaboratively, between authors and across centuries in literature, while he also endeavors to create spaces for collaborative work, in the classroom and among scholars. His current book project, entitled “Strangers in a Familiar Land,” is a historical and literary study of the relationship between medieval and modern African-American literatures.
