UTSG Office Location: LI 221 

Email: kara.gaston@utoronto.ca  
Office Hours and/or Leave Status: by appointment

Teaching and Research Interests: Medieval Literature, Chaucer, Trecento Italian literature, Form and formalisms, Reception of the Classics, Medieval Astronomy

Degrees
Ph.D., English (University of Pennsylvania); M.Phil., Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge); A.B., English (Princeton)

My research interests include late medieval English and Italian literature, Chaucer, reception of the Classics in the Middle Ages, poetry and poetics, form and formalisms, vernacular translation, gloss and commentary, and medieval astronomy. My current book project, Reading Chaucer in Time: Literary Formation in Classical Antiquity, England, and Italy, tracks the long literary history that shapes Chaucer’s poetry, using close readings of Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales to reassess the relation between the diachronic formation of Chaucer’s works and the outcome of this process in literary form.

A second project, in its early stages, uses classical and medieval astronomy in texts ranging from Aratus’s Phaenomena to works of Ovid, Lucan, Dante, and Chaucer to explore issues of perspective, perception, form, and creativity in classical and medieval poetry.

Publications

Articles and Essays 
“Forms and Celestial Motion in Chaucer’s Complaint of Mars,” PMLA. 133 (2018): 282-95

“History Writing After Coppo di Borghese Domenichi: Decameron V.9,” Le tre corone. V (2018): 121-136

“Continental Influences,” in The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of British Medieval Literature, eds. Sian Echard and Robert Rouse.(Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2017).

"The Poetics of Time Management from the Metamorphoses to Il Filocolo and The Franklin's Tale," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 37 (2015): 227-256.

"'Save Oure Tonges Difference:' Translation, Literary Histories, and Troilus and Criseyde,” The Chaucer Review 48.3 (January 2014): 258-83.