Stephanie Trigg


Stephanie Trigg is a literary scholar in the field of medieval studies, known in particular for her work on Geoffrey Chaucer. She is a Trustee of the New Chaucer Society; on the Executive Board of the International Piers Plowman Society; and on the Council of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, having been elected a fellow in 2006. She is Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor of English and Former Head of the English and Theatre Programme, University of Melbourne, Australia.

Work

Trigg's most important book is Congenial Souls. It applies the insights of critical cultural analysis to a field that tends to be more conventionally concerned with either literary description of Chaucer's work or depiction of his life and times. Instead, Trigg's book analyses the critical literature on Geoffrey Chaucer across the six-hundred-year period from his death in 1400 to the present, arguing that this long history of reading and writing about Chaucer is marked by a distinctive social process. Trigg argues that imagined and idealised reading communities formed around Chaucer's works, driven by the unconscious, collective desire to speak with Chaucer, and to become part of his own intimate circle of friends and other poets.
Trigg is the editor of ‘the standard edition’ of the medieval poem Wynnere and Wastoure. Research for the edition involved reconstructing the poem from the single, very corrupt copy of a badly damaged fifteenth-century manuscript. She has written on Australian poetry, including a book on the poet Gwen Harwood.
Stephanie Trigg is author of a blog called Humanities Researcher.

Publications