Christopher Cannon works on medieval literature and, in particular, on its sounds. He has written, most recently, on Chaucer's meter, the oral transmission of medieval texts, punctuation, and the teaching of Latin in Middle English sermons. He is writing a book on dictation from the beginnings of writing to the word-recognition software on smart phones.

He is co-editor, with James Simpson, of the Oxford Chaucer (2024), and author of From Literacy to Literature (Oxford University Press, 2016), Middle English Literature: A Cultural History (2008), The Grounds of English Literature (2004), and The Making of Chaucer's English: A Study of Words (1998). He has edited The Sound of Writing (2023) with Steven Justice, and two clusters of essays in PMLA, one on "Monolingualism and its Discontents," with Susan Koshy (2022), and another on "Aurality and Literacy," with Matthew Rubery (2020).

He has held a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and has received the William Riley Parker Prize from the MLA. He came to Johns Hopkins in 2017 after teaching at NYU, Cambridge, Oxford and UCLA. He is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America.

The Oxford Chaucer, ed. with James Simpson, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024; paperback edition, 2025).

‘What Chaucer Did to the Romance of the Rose?’ Digital Philology 14.2 (2025), 186-205.

‘Editing Chaucer’s Works: Coherence and Collaboration’ (co-authored with James Simpson), in Medieval Manuscripts, Readers and Texts: Essays in Honor of Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, ed. Misty Schieberle (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer Press, 2024), 74-104.

‘Surprised by Sound: The Achievement of the Ellesmere Editor’ Chaucer Review 58 (2023), pp. 428-41.

The Sound of Writing, co-edited with Steven Justice (Baltimore, MD:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023).

“Introduction” (with Steven Justice), in The Sound of Writing ed. Christopher Cannon and Steven Justice (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), pp. 1-20.

'The Phenomenology of -e', in The Sound of Writing, ed. Christopher Cannon and Steven Justice (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), pp. 215-31.

'Narrative on the Margins: Tales and Fabliaux', in The Oxford History of Poetry in English, vol. 2, ed. Helen Cooper and Robert Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 245-56.

'Lyric Romance', in What Is This Thing Called Medieval Lyric?' ed. Cristina Cervone and Nicholas Watson (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), 88-105.

'Reading in the Classroom', in Further Reading, ed. Matthew Rubery and Leah Price, 21^st Century Approaches to English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, March 2020), 28-37.

‘Malory’s Comedy’, in Romance Rewritten: The Evolution of Middle English Romance, ed. Elizabeth Archibald, Megan G. Leitch and Corinne Saunders (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018), 67-82.

'The Ploughman's Tale', The Yearbook of Langland Studies 32 (2018), 313-29.

From Literacy to Literature: England, 1300-1400 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

'Wyth her owen handys': What Women's Literacy Can Teach Us about Langland and Chaucer', Essays in Criticism 66 (2016): 277-300.

'Reading Knowledge', PMLA 130 (2015): 711-17.

'Vernacular Latin', Speculum 90 (2015): 641-53.

'From Literacy to Literature: Elementary Learning and the Middle English Poet', PMLA 129 (2014): 349-64.

'The Art of Rereading' ELH 80 (2013): 401-25.

'Class Distinction and the French of England' in A Modern Medievalist: Traditions and Innovations in the Study of Medieval Literature, ed. Charlotte Brewer and Barry Windeatt (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2012), 48-59.

'Chaucer and the Auchinleck Manuscript Revisited', The Chaucer Review 46 (2011): 131-46.

'The Language Group of the Canterbury Tales' in Medieval Latin and Middle English Literature: Essays in Honour of Jill Mann, ed. Christopher Cannon and Maura Nolan (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011), 25-40.

'Proverbs and the Wisdom of Literature: The Proverbs of Alfred and Chaucer's Tale of Melibee',  Textual Practice 23 (2010): 407-34.

'The Middle English Writer's Schoolroom: Fourteenth-Century English Schoolbooks and their Contents', New Medieval Literatures 11 (2009): 19-38.

Middle English Literature: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008).       

'Langland's Ars Grammatica', The Yearbook of Langland Studies 22 (2008): 1-25.

'The Lives of Geoffrey Chaucer' in The Yale Companion to Chaucer, ed. Seth Lerer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 31-54.

'Form' in Middle English: Twenty-first Century Approaches to Literature, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford:  Oxford University Press 2006), 177-90.

'The Boethianism of the Miller's Tale', Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, special number on 'Novellistik im Europäischen Mittelalter', ed. C. Young, T. Reuvekamp-Felber, and M. Chinca (2005): 324-44.

The Grounds of English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; paperback edition, 2007).          

'Between the Old and the Middle of English', New Medieval Literatures 7 (2004), 203-21.

'The Owl and the Nightingale and the Meaning of Life', Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34 (2004): 251-78.

Chaucer's Style' in The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, 2^nd edition, ed. Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 233-50.

'The Enclosed Life' in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women's Writing, ed. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 109-23.

'What Chaucer's Language Is', Studies in the Age of Chaucer 24 (2002): 301-8.

'The Form of the Self: Ancrene Wisse and Romance', Medium Aevum 70 (2001):  47-65.

'The Unchangeable Word: The Dating of Manuscripts and the History of English', Middle English Poetry: Texts and Traditions, ed. A. J. Minnis (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2001), 1-15

‘Lawman and the Laws of Men’, ELH 67 (2000):  337-63.

'Malory’s Crime: Chivalric Identity and the Evil Will', chapter 8 in Medieval Literature and Historical Enquiry: Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall, ed. David Aers (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2000), 159-83.

'Chaucer and Rape: Uncertainty’s Certainties', Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000): 67-92 [reprinted in Representing Rape: Sexual Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Elizabeth Robertson and Christine Rose (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 255-79].

'The Rights of Medieval English Women: Crime and the Issue of Representation' in Medieval Crime and Social Control, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 156-85.

'Monastic Productions' (chapter 12) in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999). 316-48.

The Making of Chaucer's English: A Study of Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; reprinted 2001; paperback edition 2005).

'Spelling Practice: The Ormulum and the Word', Forum for Modern Language Studies 33 (1997): 229-44.

'The Myth of Origin and the Making of Chaucer's English', Speculum 71 (1996): 646-75.

'Raptus in the Chaumpaigne Release and a Newly Discovered Document Concerning the Life of Geoffrey Chaucer', Speculum 68 (1993): 74-94.

'The Style and Authorship of the Otho Revision of Lawman's Brut', Medium Aevum 62 (1993): 187-209.

The Sensorium of Reading is a KSAS interdisciplinary seminar at Johns Hopkins University that seeks to understand reading as it draws upon and is shaped by mind and matter alike, within the sensorium of eyes, ears, hands, fingers, tongues, throats, necks, backs and brains. We study reading enabled (and sometimes impeded) by light, air, wind, wood, stone, glass, paper, skin and an ever-expanding array of interfaces, including the ways that texts can be sounded and heard, can be touched and can touch us.