People
ProfessorsAlfred Thomas |
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601 South Morgan Street (MC 162) |
Professor |
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Medieval and Early-Modern English and European Literature |
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Alfred Thomas’s scholarship and teaching aim to place late-medieval and early-modern English and European literature in a comparative context. His book Anne's Bohemia: Czech Literature and Society, 1310-1420 (Minnesota University Press, 1998) introduced the riches of medieval Czech literature and culture to an Anglophone audience. The sequel to this book, A Blessed Shore: England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Cornell University Press, 2007), explores cross-cultural interactions between England and Central Europe not so much in terms of diplomatic and political relations as through the images—the shifting blends of fact and fiction—that each of the two cultures nourished about the other.
Thomas’s work also engages with the relationship between class, ethnicity, and gender in both pre-modern and modern Central European culture. The Bohemian Body: Gender and Sexuality in Modern Czech Culture (University of Wisconsin Press, 2007) is the first book-length theoretical treatment of gender and sexuality in a culture and criticism traditionally dominated by essentialist notions of racial and ethnic difference.
Thomas’s teaching reflects his comparative and interdisciplinary approach to scholarship. In his undergraduate course “Shakespeare in Film” (taught as English 107) Thomas compares American, British, Japanese, and Russian cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare’s tragedies and histories, teasing out not only the filmmakers understanding of Shakespeare’s life and times but the English playwright’s relevance to their own cultural, political, and religious experience from the post-modern eclecticism of Julie Taymor’s Titus (1999) to the representation of Hamlet as a political dissident in Grigori Kozintsev’s Russian film version of the play (1964).
PUBLICATIONS
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A Blessed Shore: England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare |
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The Bohemian Body: Gender and Sexuality in Modern Czech Culture |
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Cultures of Forgery: Making Nations, Making Selves |
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Anne's Bohemia: Czech Literature and Society, 1310-1420 |
