Leonard Koff

Leonard Koff

I am an Associate of the UCLA Medieval and Renaissance Center and have degrees from Columbia and Berkeley. I have taught and developed courses at UCLA, on campus and online, including Homer and James Joyce, the Literature of Existentialism, Technology and Human Values, and Banned Books, as well as courses in Comparative Literature’s several-part humanities sequence: Western literature from antiquity to the 20th century, and World literature from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. I have written Chaucer and the Art of Storytelling (University of California Press), published essays on medieval literature, the Italian trecento, and medievalism, and lectured in this country, Europe, and the Middle East on such subjects as literature and philosophy, the shared texts of Western religious identity (Jewish, Christian, Islamic), theories of translation, Cicero, Freud, and Emmanuel Levinas. I have lectured on distance learning for the Ministry of Higher Education, Iraqi Kurdistan. I am co-editor of a volume in the Brill “Presenting the Past” series called Mobs, in which my essay on Elias Canetti appears, and co-editor of a second volume in the “Presenting the Past” series called Time: Sense, Space, Structure in which my essay “No-Time in Non-Places” will appear. My work has been published in two MLA collections, Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower and Approaches to Teaching Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. In 2009, I received a Distinguished Instructor Award from UCLA Extension and the Dean’s Award in 2019.I am an Associate of the UCLA Medieval and Renaissance Center and have degrees from Columbia and Berkeley. I have taught and developed courses at UCLA, on campus and online, including Homer and James Joyce, the Literature of Existentialism, Technology and Human Values, and Banned Books, as well as courses in Comparative Literature’s several-part humanities sequence: Western literature from antiquity to the 20th century, and World literature from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. I have written Chaucer and the Art of Storytelling (University of California Press), published essays on medieval literature, the Italian trecento, and medievalism, and lectured in this country, Europe, and the Middle East on such subjects as literature and philosophy, the shared texts of Western religious identity (Jewish, Christian, Islamic), theories of translation, Cicero, Freud, and Emmanuel Levinas. I have lectured on distance learning for the Ministry of Higher Education, Iraqi Kurdistan. I am co-editor of a volume in the Brill “Presenting the Past” series called Mobs, in which my essay on Elias Canetti appears, and co-editor of a second volume in the “Presenting the Past” series called Time: Sense, Space, Structure in which my essay “No-Time in Non-Places” will appear. My work has been published in two MLA collections, Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower and Approaches to Teaching Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. In 2009, I received a Distinguished Instructor Award from UCLA Extension and the Dean’s Award in 2019.

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