When, as a graduate student, I taught my first class (Desire and Deceit in Renaissance Fiction), I knew that I would continue to teach. I soon found my academic home in what is now NYU Liberal Studies, a program whose approach to interdisciplinary education was in many respects in accord with my own. In my roles as academic coordinator (1987- 1995) and instructor, I have sought to bring to students an appreciation of the arts and an understanding of the ways various academic disciplines and modalities of thought complement one another. My formal doctoral training is in late medieval and Renaissance literature, and I have continued to work in that field, but my real joy is found the classroom, in a commitment to experiencing along with my students how all the arts are interconnected and how they embody discrete imaginative processes and ways of knowing the world. When we interrogate various art forms, we are always communicating with other minds and cultures, and we are also talking to one another about deep convictions, questions, and aspirations. Thus, the work we do fosters communication, tolerance, and intellectual and emotional growth, and I seek to underscore this so that students will see in their studies of sometimes seemingly distant cultures an immediacy about which they can become excited and with which they can engage. With this in mind, I have dedicated much of my thirty-two years in LS to developing pedagogical resources for the program as well as for my own classes.
Nancy M. Reale
Clinical Professor
Ph.D. - New York University
M.A. - New York University
M.A. - New School for Social Research
B.A. - Cornell University
2016-2017 - LS Teaching Initiative Program Award
2009-2017 - Lehman Foundation Grant (Weisl Lectureship in Art History) for Global Arts Lecture Series
2005-2010, 2012, 2014, 2015 - LS Curriculum Development Challenge Award
2014 - Liberal Studies Jose Vazquez Award for Teaching Excellence Spring
2010 - NYU Distinguished Teaching Award
“Chaucer Kowthe in Sondry Londes,” in Standing in the Shadow of the Master, ed. Kathleen Bishop (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010)
“Companies, Misteries, and Foreign Exchange: Chaucer’s Currency for the Modern Reader,” in Chaucer in the Twenty-first Century, ed. Kathleen Bishop (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008)
Satura: Essays on Medieval Education and Religion in Honor of Robert R. Raymo. Co-editor with Ruth Sternglantz and contributor (Paul Watkins, 2001)
“Medieval Western European Debate Poetry,” in An Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature, ed. Laura Lambdin and Robert Lambdin (Greenwood, 2001)
“Selected English Translations of Boccaccio’s Decameron,” in Encyclopedia of Literary Translation. (Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000)
“Reading the Language of Love: Boccaccio's Filostrato as Intermediary between the Commedia and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde,” in Desiring Discourse: The Literature of Love, Ovid Through Chaucer, ed. Cynthia Gravlee and James Paxon (Susquehanna UP, 1998).
“Merchants in Chaucerian London and in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales,” in Chaucer's Pilgrims: An Historical Guide to the Pilgrims in Guide The Canterbury Tales, Laura and Robert Lambdin, eds. (Greenwood, 1996)
“‘Bitwixen Game and Ernest': Troilus and Criseyde as a Post-Boccaccian Response to the Commedia,” in Philological Quarterly (Summer 1992)
“Inheritance and Revision: Reinterpretations of a Father's Bequest,” in Mediaevalia 14 (1991 for 1988)
"Rhetorical Strategies in The Owl and the Nightingale," in Philological Quarterly 63 (Fall 1984)