معرفی
Eric Weiskott is Professor of English and Director of the Honors Program at Boston College. He holds a Ph.D. from Yale University and a B.A. from Wesleyan University. His academic career focuses on the intersection of poetry, poetics, and literary history, with particular expertise in medieval English literature and contemporary poetry.
Weiskott specializes in poetic meter, periodization, and the cultural history of English literary forms. His research bridges formalism and historicism, examining how poetic structures interact with historical contexts across centuries. He has developed an innovative approach he calls "verse history," which rearticulates English literary history through the cultural lives of metrical traditions. His work spans from Beowulf to Claudia Rankine, with particular emphasis on fourteenth-century and twenty-first-century poetries, and includes significant scholarship on William Langland's Piers Plowman, Chaucer, and John Gower.
Weiskott's recent publications reveal consistent thematic threads across medieval and contemporary poetry, particularly concerning apophatic poetics (representing the unrepresentable), prophecy, and the phenomenology of reading. His scholarship demonstrates how poetic form operates across historical periods, revealing unexpected connections between medieval alliterative traditions and contemporary experimental poetry.
Weiskott has authored three scholarly monographs: English Alliterative Verse: Poetic Tradition and Literary History (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), and Unheard Melodies: Apophatic Poetics and Literary Reading (Fordham University Press, forthcoming). He has also published the poetry collection Cycle of Dreams (punctum books, 2024) and is completing critical editions of William Langland's Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the A-text (University of Exeter Press, forthcoming) and Geoffrey Chaucer's Book of the Duchess.
As an educator, Weiskott teaches courses including Chaucer and Gower, Game of Thrones: Medieval English Political Poetry, Studies in Poetry, and Introduction to Creative Writing. He previously directed graduate programs in English at Boston College for five years before becoming Director of the undergraduate Honors Program. His public writing on literature, politics, and higher education appears in prominent venues including The Atlantic, Vox, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, where he has addressed topics ranging from poetry's contemporary resurgence to critiques of medievalism in political discourse.
