Ian Cornelius

Ian Cornelius

Philologist

I study poetics, literary language, book history, and the histories of texts as a member of the English faculty at Loyola University Chicago. I am also director of graduate programs in English.

At Loyola I teach for the core curriculum (introductions to literary reading and poetry), undergraduate English major (Old English, the history of the English language, and English literature to about 1640), and English graduate programs (medieval English literature, pre-industrial European book history). Materials for some recent courses are posted to GitHub.

Details on published works are listed in my cv and zotero profile, both of which supply links where available. Many of my publications can be downloaded from eCommons in the form of ‘author’s accepted versions.’ Current projects include the following:

  1. Philological studies, mostly on medieval English, a few on medieval Latin or aspects of contact or translation. Some recent studies appear in the collections Latin Literatures in Medieval and Early Modern Times Inside and Outside Europe: A Millennium History (2024), Literary Theory and Criticism in the Later Middle Ages (2023), The Sound of Writing (2023), Medieval Literary Voices (2022), and What Kind of a Thing is a Middle English Lyric? (2022). Others are forthcoming in A History of Punctuation in English Literature and the journal Medium Ævum.
  2. Data curation for the Digital Index of Middle English Verse. Data and documentation are on GitHub.
  3. A documentary edition of the text of Piers Plowman in New Haven, Beinecke Library, Takamiya MS 23. A provisional machine-readable transcription is archived on Zenodo. See the articles in The Journal of the Early Book Society (2023) and The Review of English Studies (2025).

From 2020 to 2023 I contributed to the Peripheral Manuscripts Project, an on-line repository of medieval manuscript materials held in smaller institutional collections in the American Midwest. Articles related to this project have appeared in Manuscript Studies (2023) and The Journal of the Early Book Society (2023).