Johns Hopkins University

Department Member, German and Romance Languages and Literatures

James M. Beall Professor Emeritus of French and Humanities and Research Professor

Krieger School of Arts and Sciences

About

Stephen Nichols, James M. Beall Professor Emeritus of French and Humanities and Research Professor, specializes in medieval literature and its interactions with history, philosophy,language theory, and history of art. His book ROMANESQUE SIGNS: EARLY MEDIEVAL NARRATIVE AND ICONOGRAPHY, received the Modern Language Association's James Russell Lowell Prize for an outstanding book by an MLA author. Another, THE NEW PHILOLOGY, was honored by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. 

He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Geneva and was made an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Government. In 2008, he received a Research Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Bonn, Germany.

In July 2010, he received an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Emeritus Research Fellowship to study the paradox of “mutable stability” across multiple manuscripts of  "Le Roman de la Rose." In December 2010, he was awarded a multi-year Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant for a group project entitled "Innovative Scholarship for Digitized Medieval Manuscripts Delivered in an Interoperable Environment."

Over the last decade, in a project sponsored by the Mellon Foundation, Nichols has been instrumental in developing a digital library of medieval manuscripts at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library of Johns Hopkins University: www.romandelarose.org. This project is in partnership with the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

He is a founding editor of the  onlinet revue, "Digital Philology; A Journal of Medieval Culture," to be published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, beginning in the spring of 2012.

A Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, he is a Senior Fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory, which he also directed for five years (http://sct.arts.cornell.edu). He has held the following fellowships: Guggenheim, ACLS, NEH, APS, Woodrow Wilson. He has received resident fellowships at the Humanities Research Institute, University of California, Irvine; the Advanced Institute for Study, The University of Wisconsin, Madison; the Dahlem Humanities Center, FU-Berlin.

A second, expanded edition of ROMANESQUE SIGNS: EARLY MEDIEVAL NARRATIVE AND ICONOGRAPHY was published in May 2011 by the Davies Group. Besides a new Introduction, a chapter has been added: "The Snare of Words...On the Invention of 'Romanesque'."

Recent publications include THE LONG SHADOW OF POLITICAL THEOLOGY; RETHINKING THE MEDIEVAL SENSES; L'ALTERITE DU MOYEN AGE;  MEDIEVALISM AND THE MODERNIST TEMPER; THE WHOLE BOOK; THE NEW MEDIEVALISM; and MIMESIS FROM MIRROR TO METHOD, AUGUSTINE TO DESCARTES. 

Current projects include: LAUGHING MATTERS: THE ENIGMA AND EXASPERATION OF LAUGHTER; VOICES IN THE TEXT: WRITING AND ORALITY IN THE TROUBADOUR LYRIC; and BUILDING HISTORY: THE POLITICS OF MEDIEVALISM IN RESTORATION FRANCE.

Nichols is a member of the MLA’s Scholarly Editions Committee (2011-2014); has a five year appointment to the European Research Council’s grants committee (SH5) for Humanities (2009-2014); he chairs the Award panel of the “Hidden Collections” grants administered for the Mellon Foundation by the Council for Library Information Research (CLIR), is a member of the grants Panel for Mellon Post-doctoral fellows in research libraries administered by CLIR, and is Chairman of the Board of Directors of CLIR (2009-2012).

A volume of Essays in his honor, "Philology, History, Theory: Rethinking the New Medievalism," will be published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 2013.

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