R. Allen Shoaf, Alumni Professor of English, Emeritus, at the University of Florida, is the author of more than a dozen books and nearly 100 papers and reviews, twice a holder of Fellowships of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Founding Editor of the prize-winning journal EXEMPLARIA: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, which he edited from 1987 until 2008, and the winner of six teaching awards during his career at UF, including "University-wide Teacher of the Year," in 1992. He is the author also of several books of poetry and a contributor to poetry magazines. A former Marshall Scholar (class of 1970) in the University of East Anglia (BA Hon 1972), he has dedicated his career to Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, authoring books and numerous articles on all three poets, as he has also published regularly over the past 40 years in Dante scholarship, especially regarding the relationship between late medieval sign theory and the COMMEDIA. His poems undertake explorations of eroticism, quantum physics, biology, neuroscience, politics, and the "biographies" of words in the English language, their origins in Greek, Latin, French, German, Norse, and numerous other progenitors, plus their "lives" in subsequent eras, especially the Middle Ages and the Early Modern periods.
