Dr. Morton will be a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of French and Romance Philology.  This Fall he’s teaching a course on “Le Roman de la rose and Medieval Discourses of Nature.”

Jonathan Morton is a Junior Research Fellow at New College, University of Oxford. He works on medieval French and Latin literature and intellectual history, with a particular focus on the relationship between poetry and philosophy. In 2014 he completed his D. Phil. at Oxford on the Roman de la rose and Aristotelian philosophy in the thirteenth century, on the basis of which he is writing a book, entitled Nature, Art, and Ethics: The Roman de la rose in its philosophical context, which reinterprets the Rose by examining its dialogue with and reworking of some of the key philosophical texts and traditions of the thirteenth century when it was composed. As well as writing articles on different aspects of the Roman de la rose, he works on French and Latin bestiaries, particularly studying their relationship with Neoplatonic theology. He has recently started work on a new project about creativity and its meaning in the High Middle Ages, with a focus on the philosophical poetry of the Chartrian school and the representation of technology in vernacular and Latin sources

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/french/department/fac_bios/morton.html