Author Archives: Prof Andrew Galloway

Prof Andrew Galloway

About Prof Andrew Galloway

Andrew Galloway has been a member of Cornell University’s English Department since receiving his PhD from U. C. Berkeley in 1991. He has written numerous essays on medieval English, Latin, and French literature and culture from the tenth to the fifteenth century, especially Piers Plowman, Chaucer’s poetry, Gower’s poetry, and their fifteenth-century followers, as well as essays on medieval historical writing such as a chapter in the Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (2002) and, recently, entries for the Brill Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle. For seven years he edited the annual volumes of The Yearbook of Langland Studies, and he provided the translations of the Latin verses and glosses for the new 3-volume edition of Gower’s Confessio Amantis by Russell Peck (2000-2005). His monographs include The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman: Volume 1 (2006), and the short introductory monograph Medieval Literature and Culture (2006); later this year will appear under his editorship The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Culture. He is currently working on other edited volumes plus studies on medieval ideas of need, medieval dream visions, London literature, Gower’s uses of classical literature, and a history of Middle English literature.

Opinions The Culture of Plagiarized Dissertations in Romania: A Call for Inquiry in the Humanities—and Beyond?

by on in Opinions
Prof Andrew Galloway

The high-profile cases of plagiarized dissertations recently featured in Integru and elsewhere are typically those from fields—the sciences and economics, especially—where substantial social and professional power is at stake. But what about the humanities? These cases should not be ignored. The standards should be no different from those in the sciences or any other field. If we say that plagiarists in the humanities might be due a bit more compassion, on the grounds that such humanities PhDs are less likely to go on to jobs with major political or economic importance, then we are simply endorsing the marginal position that the humanities too often occupy in modern culture in general. Humanists deserve at least the same standards as anyone else. They can even be credited with inventing such standards. Such were the efforts, for example, by Renaissance philologists and writers who sought to define the actual canon of works by ancient authors as distinct from the numbers of works that medieval writers with greater or lesser disingenuousness foisted on those ancient writers . . .