Nathan Phelps
Education
BA (English) University of Wyoming
MA (English) Oregon State University
Areas of Interest
Middle English and Latin chronicles, histories, and romance; posthumanism, ecocriticism, and new materialisms; Jerusalem and Wales in literature; intellectual history and medieval ways of being and thinking
Profile
My scholarly focus tends to concentrate on how medieval ways of existing in and thinking about the world construct different spatial/temporal, material, and ecological relationships in texts. I have written about how some medieval ways of thinking about nature have in a few instances, decentered the human and written nonhuman 'things' with a powerful, divine agency. Likewise, I have written about the grammar of agency, and the ways that medieval Latin grammatically constructs agential hierarchies. My research is particularly interested in those ways of thinking and being that may not have been co-opted by modernity. By studying them I hope to find medieval insights which may resonate with today's realities. Subsequently, I find myself drawn toward discussions about apocalypse, calamity, and the eschaton.
Scholarly Activity
Master’s Symposium at Oregon State University, “God’s Hard-to-Understand Decisions: The Itinerarium Cambriae and Writing Divine Agency in the Non-Human,” Corvallis, Oregon. 2019
Transatlantic Symposium, “Political Prophecy in Contemporary Discussions of Brexit,” Berlin, Germany. 2019