Personal Website: http://web.mac.com/kkoppelman/iWeb/Site/Home.html

Welcome statement (teaching/research/personal interests): Both my teaching and my research explore moments of textual, cultural, and historical anxiety--moments of “unknowing” or uncertainty regarding individual, national, or religious identities. I am particularly interested in the culture of the Middle Ages for what it can teach us about our own efforts to negotiate between and among various external (and sometimes internal) expectations. I use psychoanalytic theory because I feel that it provides us with a unique vocabulary to talk about such negotiations--additionally, I feel as though it constantly pushes the edges of what we see as comfortable, knowable, or real. I also have an unrelenting interest in detective fiction, and a particular affection for British mysteries (Hercule Poirot is my hero).

Interests: Medieval literature and culture, psychoanalytic theory

Current and Recent Courses: Masculinities and Its Discontents; Chaucer; Medieval and Early Modern Women; Detective Fiction; Critical Theory; Buddhism and Its Influence on World Literature

 Film Courses: Film Noir Genre

Dream or Future Courses: I’d love to teach a course on the tradition of Courtly Love . . . or one on apocalyptic literature in the Middle Ages . . . or maybe one devoted entirely to the writings of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Zizek . . . but I don’t know if anyone would take that.