Ardis Butterfield designated the Schiff Professor of English

Ardis R.T. Butterfield, newly named as the John M. Schiff Professor of English, conducts her research on Chaucer and nationhood; bilingualism and medieval linguistic identities; the literatures and music of France and England from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries; continental and insular vernacular manuscripts and the relationships between them; city writing; the medieval lyric; and theories and histories of language, form, and genre.

Butterfield studied at Trinity College, Cambridge where she received a B.A., an M.A., and a Ph.D. She also attended the University of Bristol, graduating with an M.A. in Medieval English. Butterfield held teaching positions at Cambridge and University College London before coming to Yale in 2012 as professor of English. Her visiting appointments include periods at the University of Virginia, the Huntington Library, San Marino and All Souls College, Oxford.

Butterfield’s books include “The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War” and “Poetry and Music in Medieval France.” She edited “Chaucer and the City,” a collection of essays. She has contributed numerous articles, chapters, and reviews to edited volumes and journals across the disciplines of English, French and Music.

Butterfield co-founded The Medieval Song Network, a collaborative, international project to encourage new interdisciplinary research on the medieval lyric. At Yale, she also co-founded the Medieval Song Lab, a forum for cross-disciplinary research on medieval song. 

Butterfield is an elected fellow of the English Association and was twice awarded Leverhulme Trust fellowships. She won the R.H. Gapper Prize by the Society for French Studies for her book, “The Familiar Enemy.” She is a member of several professional societies including the New Chaucer Society, Medium Aevum, the Royal Musical Association, and the Early Book Society. Butterfield has been an invited lecturer at numerous conferences in the United States, France, Switzerland, Canada, Korea, and the United Kingdom, among others.