Robert (Bobby) Meyer-Lee
Phone: 404.471.6524
Email: rmeyerlee@agnesscott.edu
Office Location: Buttrick 222
Academic Degrees
- BA, Williams College
- MA, New York University
- PhD, Yale University
Teaching and Scholarly Interests
Professor Meyer-Lee’s specialty is early English literature, especially the literature of the late medieval period, from about 1350 through the early 1500s. In his teaching, he seeks to foster students’ appreciation of both the familiarity and strangeness of these early texts, and how their very distance from us fruitfully complicates such basic questions about the literary enterprise as: what is literature, what do we claim to be its value and function, and how well, in practice, it lives up to these ideals. Such questions also lurk within his scholarly interests, with his published work addressing topics ranging from the relations of poetry and political power in the 1400s, to relations between literary value and social identity in Geoffrey’s Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, to the challenges the concept of literary value presents to literary scholarship and teaching. His latest book, (Routledge 2025) speaks to a broad audience of students, general readers, teachers, and scholars about the interest that Chaucer still holds for us now.