Christopher Cannon was educated at Harvard, and has taught at UCLA, Oxford, Cambridge, NYU, and now at Johns Hopkins University. He has written books on the traditional nature of Chaucer's language, early Middle English and literary form, as well as a cultural history of Middle English. He has held several fellowships from the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council, a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and he recently won the William Riley Parker Prize from the MLA. He is the author of From Literacy to Literature (Oxford University Press, 2016), Middle English Literature: A Cultural History (2008), The Grounds of English Literature (2004), and The Making of Chaucer's English: A Study of Words (1998).