Carl G. Martin

Carl G. Martin joined the English faculty at Norwich in 2010. He specializes in early English language and literature, with a research focus on class and violence in works of the 14th–16th centuries. He also regularly teaches science fiction and world literature.

Martin has received many awards for his scholarship including a Mellon Fellowship (2001), the Norwich University Award for Excellence in Research (2011, 2014), and in 2016 he enjoyed a month’s residency as a Mayers Fellow at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, to study Thomas Hoccleve’s medieval manuscripts.

Martin, born and raised in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to immigrant parents, has always been interested in the stories — and histories — of earlier times and distant places. He teaches early British and world literatures, as well as History of the English Language, Science Fiction Literature, and The Bible as Literature. He hopes to devote more attention in his classes to the epic Beowulf and J.R.R. Tolkien’s work.

His scholarship focuses on class, violence, and ideology in 15th- and 16th-century texts. He tries to explore and expose the literary and cultural tools that the European aristocracy used to rationalize its violence and material power, which perpetuated class-based injustices. He is also an editorial board member of the journal Socialism and Democracy, for which he writes book reviews on history, philosophy, and the visual arts.

Martin served for five years on the Faculty Senate and is currently Chair of the Faculty Library Committee.
 

Ph.D. English, Tufts University

M.Litt. English, Aberdeen University

B.A. English, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth

EN 350 History of the English Language
EN 225 Survey of British Literature I
EN 222 Global Science Fiction

Martin, Carl Grey. “The Cloak and the Clog: Tudor Portraiture and Sir Thomas Wyatt’s First Satire.” Studies in Philology, vol. 121, no. 1, 2024, pp. 28–57.

---. “The Cipher of Chivalry: Violence as Courtly Play in the World of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 2nd ed., edited by Laura L. Howes. W. W. Norton, 2022, pp. 192–209.

---. “In Agincourt’s Shadow: Hoccleve’s ‘Balade au … compagnie du Iarter’ and the Domestication of Henry V.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer, vol. 41, 2019, pp. 183–219.