Education: B.A.,
Stanford University (1985); Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles.
Expertise: Medieval English Literature,
Mysticism, and Intellectual History; The Oxford Inklings; History of the English
Language; Christianity and Literature; René Girard's mimetic theory.
Selected Works: “The Point of the
Plow: Conceptual Blending in the Allegory of Langland and Voltaire,”; “C.
S. Lewis and René Girard on Desire, Conversion, and Myth: The Case of
Till We Have Faces”; “How to Read Like a Fool: Riddle Contests
and the Banquet of Conscience in Piers Plowman”; "The Poetics of
Enigma: Riddles, Rhetoric, and Theology in Piers Plowman and Its Contemporaries" (in
progress); "Desire, Violence, and the Passion in Fragment VII of The Canterbury
Tales: A Girardian Reading"; "Dante's Quest for Home."
Distinctions: Lilly/Crossroads Grant (2004); Sluyter Fellowship
(Hope, 2000-01); Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant (Huntington Library, Summer
1999); Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship; Woodrow Wilson
National Fellowship Foundation (1996-97).
Contact: Lubbers Hall 304
616.395.7996
gruenler@hope.edu
