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, form and formalisms, vernacular translation, gloss and commentary, and medieval astronomy. My first book, Reading Chaucer in Time: Literary Formation in England and Italy, uses source study to reassess the relation between formation and form in Chaucer's poetry. My current research focuses on literature and astronomy, including the textbooks of Sacrobosco and Al-Farghani and the poetry of Aratus, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Dante, and Chaucer. It explores what it means to think about the cosmos in literary terms and vice versa.

Publications

Books

Reading Chaucer in Time: Literary Formation in England and Italy. Oxford University Press, 2020. 

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.