Richard F. Green

Professor Emeritus of English green.693@osu.edu

Richard Firth Green was born in England and educated at Jesus College, Oxford (BA and MA), and the University of Toronto (PhD). He moved to Canada in 1965, and has been a Canadian citizen for over forty years. He has taught at a number of Canadian Universities (including Mount Allison University, Bishops University , and the University of British Columbia), but his longest appointment (twenty years) was at Western University in Ontario. In 2002 he moved to the Ohio State University, attracted by its strengths in both medieval studies and folklore, and from 2006 to 2013 he served as Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Although his home unit at OSU was the English Department, he regards himself as much a cultural historian as a literary critic; along with standard medieval English literature courses, he regularly taught a course on Witchcraft for CMRS and one on the Traditional Ballad for Folklore; he has also taught non-medieval courses on Literature and Law. His earlier work was generally in the area of late medieval literary patronage, and later he worked on the relationship between literature and law (again, primarily in the late middle ages). His most recent interest in medieval popular culture has borne fruit in the form of a book on medieval fairy beliefs (published by the University of Pennsylvania Press). He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, President of the New Chaucer Society, and a Councilor of the Medieval Academy of America. Richard Firth Green retired at the end of 2015 and now lives in Stratford, Ontario.