Nicholas Babich
Ph.D.
- nbabich@nd.edu
Areas of Expertise
Old and Middle English; Old English heroic poetry; Old English Benedictine literature and the Exeter Book; Alliterative revival and Middle English lyric; Boethius and Augustinian Meditation; Post-Critique and the Postsecular; Newman, Robert Hugh Benson
Biography
I am an English Ph.D. candidate specializing in medieval literature. I am interested particularly in the interaction of the pagan and Christian, as well as secular and sacred content in medieval texts. I have examined these interactions in my dissertation using literary-rhetorical methods and some narrative theory. This has also led me to study biblical allegory, medieval literary allegory and, generally speaking, literary rhetoric in the Middle Ages. My work aims to prevent new, systematic, and more nuanced approaches to some of these literary phenomena across medieval English texts. My structural interest in literature has taken me sometimes into the realm of both theology and rhetoric, in which fields I have been indebted to the theology of Augustine, the artistic model of Boethius, as well as the modern critical insights of Paul Ricoeur, Rita Felski, and scholars in the "Religion and Literature" ambit.
Scholarly Activity
Managing Editor for Religion & Literature at the University of Notre Dame, Fall 2021-2022
Author of “Navigating Between Reactionary Traditionalism and Naïve Modernism: Robert Hugh Benson’s Agnosticism” in Church Life Journal: A Journal of the McGrath Institute for Church Life (June 2022).
“’Þær us eall seo fæstnung standeþ:’ Boethian Meditation in The Wanderer” at the International Medieval Congress, Leeds, UK (Summer 2023).
“The Poetics of Loss, Recover, and Regret in Sir Orfeo” at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan (Spring 2023).
“’We have only known the back of the world:’ Victorian Realism, Fantasy, and the Supernatural in The Man Who Was Thursday” in Durham University’s “Catholicism, Literature, and the Arts III: The Poetics of Liturgy and Place,” London, UK (Summer 2022).
“Think on the Bludy Serk: Form and Allegory in Henryson’s Poetic Corpus.” 16th International Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Scottish Literature and Language Summer, 2021.
“Fantasy and the Rhetoric of Victorian Realism in The Man Who Was Thursday.” NCA 107th Annual Convention, November 2021.
“Robert Hugh Benson and the Catholic Agnostic.” NCA 107th Annual Convention, November 2021.
Author of “Nam Virtus Perficitur in Infirmitate: Christian Baptism of the Heroic Tradition and The Battle of Maldon.” Pennsylvania State University Honors Thesis. May 2019.