Areas of Interest
- Textual Criticism of English and continental printed books and manuscripts from the fourteenth century
- The History of Editing
- The Material Text
- Unediting/Textual Midwifery
Honours
- Fredson Bowers Memorial Biennial Prize (2005) from the Society for Textual Scholarship – for the essay “Gerard Hopkins and the Shapes of his Sonnets” (2004).
- Mellon Fellowship (2001).
- Rosenbach Lectures, University of Pennsylvania (1999–2000).
- Guggenheim Fellowship (1988).
- Sohier Prize, best undergraduate thesis in a modern language, Harvard College (1966).
Invention
The McLeod Portable Collator, a stereoscopic device for comparing texts as images. A dozen and a half models have been placed with private scholars and in research institutions on three continents (including the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and London; the National Library of Wales; Università di Udine; New York Public Library, Pierpont Morgan Library, etc.).
Publications
Book Publications
Cyndia Clegg and Randall McLeod, The peaceable and prosperous regiment of blessed Queene Elisabeth: A Facsimile from Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587), Huntington Library Press (2005).
Randall M Leod, ed., Crisis in Editing: Texts of the English Renaissance, AMS (1994).
Essay Publications
Alba Page, “The Sewers of Paris”, Chicago Review, 59:1 (Fall 2014) (16 pp.).
Laksmi Cohen MacGregor, “On the Typography of Blank Pages,” Chicago Review, 58:1 (Summer 2013) (8 pp.)
“THE UNEDITOR: Randall McLeod in conversation with Mark Owens, July 2008”, in Dot Dot Dot 18, 24 August 2009, 40–57 (18 pages).
R. MacGeddon, “Hammered”, in Negotiating the Jacobean Printed Book, Pete Langman, ed., Ashgate, 2010, 136–199 (64 pages).
Random Cloud, “Fearful Asymmetry”, in The Cambridge Companion to Textual Criticism, Freistat and Flanders, eds., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2013, 134–87 (54 pages).
Randall Mc Leod, “The Fog of art ”, in Exercises furieux: A partir de l’édition de l’ Orlando furioso De Franceschi (Venise, 1584), Ilaria Andreoli, ed., Lang, Zurich, 2013, 162–247 (86 pp).
Randall McLeod, “Obliterature: Reading a Censored Text of Donne’s ‘To his mistres going to bed’”, English Manuscript Studies 12 (2005).
Randall McLeod, “Gerard Hopkins and the Shapes of his Sonnets”, in Raimonda Modiano, Leroy F. Searle and Peter Shillingsburg, eds., VoiceTextHypertext: Emerging Practices in Textual Studies, University of Washington Press (2003).
Ana Mary Armygram, “The Triumph of King James and His August Descendants,” Shakespeare Studies 28 (2000).
Random Cloud, “Where Angels Fear to read”, in Joe Bray, Miriam Handley, and Anne C. Henry, eds., Ma(r)king the Text, Ashgate (2000).
Randal Mc Leod, “ALTVM SAPERE: Parole d’homme et Verbe divin. Les chronologies de la Bible hébraïque in-4° de Robert Estienne”, in La Bible imprimée dans l’Europe moderne (XVe-XVIIIe siècle), Bertram Schwarzbach, ed., Bibliothèque nationale de France (1999).
Orlando F. Booke, “IMAGIC / a long discourse”, Studies in the Literary Imagination 32.1 (1999).
Randall McLeod, “Unemending Shakespeare’s Sonnet 111” (1981), reprinted in Stephen Orgel, ed., Shakespeare, The Critical Complex, Garland (1999).
Randall McLeod, “UN Editing Shak-speare” (1982), reprinted in Stephen Orgel, ed., Shakespeare, The Critical Complex, Garland (1999).
Random Cloud, “Shakespeare Babel”, in Joanne Gondris, ed., Reading Readings: Essays on Shakespeare Editing in the Eighteenth Century, AUP (1997).
Random Cloud, “What’s The Bastard’s Name / Random Cloud”, in George Walton Williams, ed., Shakespeare’s Speech-Headings, AUP (1997).
Random Cloud, “Enter Reader”, in Paul Eggert and Margaret Sankey, eds., The Editorial Gaze, Garland (1999).
Claudia Nimbus, “An Evening without Mrs. Siddons”, Critical Survey 7.3 (1995).
Random Cloud, “FIAT fLUX”, in Randall M Leod, ed., Crisis in Editing: Texts of the English Renaissance, AMS (1994).
Randall McLeod, “Il collazionatore portatile McLeod: una veloce collatio dei testi a stampa come figure” in Marco Santoro, ed., La Stampa in Italia nel Cinquecento, Bulzoni (1992).
Random Cloud, “‘The very names of the Persons’: Editing and the Invention of Dramatick Character”, in David Kastan and Peter Stallybrass, eds., Staging the Renaissance, Routledge (1991).
Random Clod, “Information on Information”, Text 5 (1991).
Random Cloud, “from Tranceformations in the Text of Orlando Furioso”, The Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at Austin (1990); also issued in New Directions in Textual Studies, Dave Oliphant and Robin Bradford, eds. (1990).
Randall McLeod, “McLeod Portable Collator”, Newsletter, Humanities Association of Canada (1988).
Random Cloud, “The Psychopathology of Everyday Art”, in George R. Hibbard, ed., The Elizabethan Theatre IX: Papers given at the Ninth International Conference on Elizabethan Theatre held at the University of Waterloo, in July 1981 (1986).
Randall McLeod, “Spellbound”, in G. B. Shand and Raymond C. Shady, eds., Play-Texts in Old Spelling, AMS (1984).
Randall McLeod, “Gon. No more, the text is foolish”, in Gary Taylor and Michael Warren, eds., The Division of the Kingdoms, OUP (1983; reprinted 1986).
“McLeod’s Portable Collator”, Bibliography Newsletter (1983).
Random Cloud, “The Marriage of Good and Bad Quartos”, Shakespeare Quarterly (1982).
Randall McLeod, “UN Editing Shak-speare”, Sub-stance 33/34 (1982).
Randall McLeod, “Unemending Shakespeare’s Sonnet 111”, Studies in English Literature 21 (1981).
Randall McLeod, “Spellbound: Typography and the Concept of Old-Spelling Editions”, Renaissance and Reformation n.s. 3.1 (1979).
Randall McLeod, “A Technique of Headline Analysis, with Application to Shake-speares Sonnets, 1609”, Studies in Bibliography 32 (1979).
Current Research
The press of Aldus Manutius; topics in the archeology of the book: bearing type, folding of paper, standing press, offset, sewing; the editorial history of the poetry of John Donne; a photo-facsimile edition of the almost seventy early 17th-century manuscripts of John Donne’s “To his mistress going to bed”.