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English and Theatre
PO Box 1510
Pembroke, NC 28372
Phone: 910.521.6246
Fax: 910.775.4092
Relay: 910.521.6246
Email: Click here
Location: Dial Humanities Building, Suite 104
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meet a professor
Dr. Roger Ladd (Director of Graduate Studies)
Since coming to UNCP in 2003, I have taught a variety of courses, including Composition I and II, World Literature before 1660, British Literature before 1790, Medieval Literature, Tolkien, King Arthur, Chaucer, Aspects of the English Language, and Principles of Literary Study. I find that whatever I teach, I always enjoy being a part of students’ experience of intellectual and personal growth. UNCP has been a wonderful place to teach, and I enjoy coming to work every day.
My main focus in the literature classroom is my students' experience of the relatively distant past through texts and their material contexts. Because I focus on early literature, my main goal is to help students bridge the gaps caused by the alterity of the past, and to find common ground with those texts that often seem the most foreign. I believe that the challenge sometimes presented by this alterity provides a unique opportunity to develop writing, research, and interpretive skills. My students balance group discussions, individual research, and a variety of writing assignments and presentations in their own quests for understanding.
My own research focuses primarily on the late Middle Ages, particularly such authors as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, William Langland, and Margery Kempe. My methodology is primarily materialist in nature, and in particular focuses on the lessons we can learn about the ideology of late medieval texts from recent work in economic history. I also remain interested in questions of language, the ways that manuscript and scribal contexts can help us to understand texts, and in how some of the ideas addressed by late medieval writers find expression in the popular literature of the Elizabethan period, or of our own day. I have published articles on Chaucer, Gower, Kempe, Everyman, and the Early Modern novelist Thomas Deloney; Palgrave has just published my book, Antimercantilism in Late Medieval English Literature.
Updated: Wednesday, September 29, 2010
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PO Box 1510 Pembroke, NC 28372-1510 • 910.521.6000