Professor Michael D.C. Drout,

Professor English,

Wheaton College,

Norton, MA

A specialist in both medieval literature and fantasy, Michael Drout is Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Study of Medieval at Wheaton College in Norton, MA. He received his Ph.D. from Loyola University in 1997 and also holds M.A. degrees from Stanford (journalism) and the University of Missouri-Columbia (English literature) and a B.A. from Carnegie Mellon. He was awarded Wheaton’s Faculty Appreciation Award (2002) and Prentice Professorship (2003-2008) for his teaching and has been a Millicent C. McIntosh Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Institute. Drout is the editor of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Beowulf and the Critics (which won the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inklings Studies for 2003), and the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia (2007), and is co-editor and co-founder of the journal Tolkien Studies. His many books include How Tradition Works: A Meme-Based Poetics of the Anglo-Saxon Tenth Century (2006), Drout’s Quick and Easy Old English (2012), Tradition and Influence in Anglo-Saxon Literature (2013), and Beowulf Unlocked: New Evidence from Lexomic Analysis (2016). He has also recorded 13 audio programs for The Modern Scholar, including A Way With Words IV: Understanding Poetry, which was a finalist for a 2010 Audie Award. His current research focuses on computer-assisted statistical analysis of texts and has been supported by three grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.