Kenneth Rooney

Dr Ken Rooney has been Lecturer in Medieval & Renaissance Literature in the Depertment of English since 2005. 

He specialises in the literature of the later Middle Ages in English, and his research has explored the handling of the dead in medieval literary genres, the subject of his monograph, Mortality and Imagination (Brepols, 2011).

His undergraduate taught courses include Chaucer: the Canterbury Tales, and Romance: Medieval to Renaissance. He also teaches on the MA in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. 

He has been the lead supervisor of four PhDs to graduation, and has been the co-supervisor of several others, on subjects including Malory, Medieval Literary Humour, and Pilgrimage in medieval writing. 

He is currently Director of Teaching in the School of English and Digital Humanities.  

My research concentrates on the genres and contexts of later medieval English literature (Middle English) and its interaction with other modes of medieval and renaissance culture. My first monograph, Mortality and Imagination: The Life of the Dead in Medieval English Literature, was published by Breols in 2011. It is the first history of the literary ‘life’ of the dead, in all genres, in English medieval vernacular writing. As a researcher and teacher, my aims in both are to widen knowledge of the production, reception, and contexts for medieval and renaissance writing in English, and its modern critical reception, and to bring this research to as wide an audience as possible, both specialist and non-specialist. My method of inquiry is interdisciplinary; both in terms of contextualising English literary achievement in the Middle Ages relative to its vernacular peers, and assessing the place of literature in the cultural networks – musical, artistic, religious – of the Middle Ages and thereafter. Ongoing research in the next five-year period will focus not only on the cultural dissemination of ideas of mortality, over time, but also reflect my interest in teaching and publishing on romance and other genres, and their cross-cultural, textual, and intertextual matrices.

I teach Middle English writing in the School of English's lecture and seminar courses at undergraduate level, and in its MA programme in Medieval and Renaissance English.

As a teacher, as well as researcher, my aims are to introduce students to knowledge of the production, reception, and contexts for medieval and renaissance writing in English. My method of inquiry is interdisciplinary; both in terms of contextualising English literary achievement in the Middle Ages relative to its vernacular peers, and assessing the place of literature in the cultural networks – musical, artistic, religious – of the Middle Ages and thereafter. My goal is to allow students to recreate for themselves the cultural contexts and pleasures of these unfamiliar and exciting texts.