Meet the Team

David Coley is Professor of English at Simon Fraser University, where he primarily teaches the literature of the later Middle Ages, including Geoffrey Chaucer, the Pearl/Gawain-Poet, Margery Kempe, John Gower, and other writers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. David’s most recent book, Death and the Pearl Maiden: Plague, Poetry, England (Ohio State, 2019), was awarded the 2020 Margaret Wade Labarge Prize for best book in medieval studies by the Canadian Society of Medievalists. It explores submerged discourses of plague in the four poems of the Pearl Manuscript and argues for the recognition of pestilence within fourteenth-century English poetry more broadly. His earlier monograph, The Wheel of Language: Representing Speech in Middle English Poetry, 1377-1422 (Syracuse, 2012), posits the representation of the spoken word as a powerful and efficacious act, which both critiqued and created social, political, and religious realities in the later Middle Ages. David’s articles have appeared in such journals as Studies in the Age of Chaucer, JEGP, The Chaucer Review, Exemplaria, and Florilegium, and he is a contributor to numerous edited volumes, including Chaucer and Trauma (Penn State, forthcoming 2025), The Cambridge Companion to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge, 2020), Premodern Ecologies in the Modern Literary Imagination (Toronto, 2019), and Approaches to Teaching the Middle English Pearl (MLA, 2018). David’s dog, Appa, regularly accompanies him to campus and participates robustly in the intellectual life of the English Department. David is never not listening to music.