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Heather Hayton
English and Creative Writing Department

Heather Hayton

Robert K. Marshall Professor of English


Office

Archdale-TBD
+1 (336) 3162397
hhayton@guilford.edu

Biography


Heather Hayton
Heather Hayton

Meet the Professor

Heather Hayton has been at Guilford College since 2004, and is currently the Robert K. Marshall Professor of English. She has been chair of the English and Creative Writing Department three times, and she directed the Honors Program for 10 years.

Heather teaches a wide variety of courses ranging from medieval literature to Shakespeare to Binge culture to monster studies to queer studies. Her popular course called "The Binge" studies how narratives and story arcs change when we binge multimedia rather than watch/play/read it episodically. She has also created half a dozen study abroad programs, including one that walks part of the Camino de Compostela pilgrimage route, one focused on religious and ecological sustainability in the Himalayas, one that studies Dante in Tuscany, and one that studies pirates and privateers in the Caribbean. She is currently at work creating a course on chocolate that takes place in St. Lucia.

Heather's research directly feeds her teaching. She is the author of three books and multiple articles or chapters, and she is at work on a longer project that maps the history of hospitality in ancient and medieval European food recipes and practices. 

One of her favorite courses is on monster studies, and another reads Milton's Paradise Lost from a Quaker context. All of her courses are interactive and include plenty of challenging discussion and laughter. 

Education


Pennsylvania State University, Ph.D.,
Comparative Literature
University of California, Davis, B.A.,
English

Selected Scholarship


  • A Companion to Late Medieval and Early Modern Siena (Brill Press, 2020)
  • Monsters in the Classroom (McFarland Press, 2017)
  • Translating Desire in Medieval and Early Modern Literature (2005)

Courses Taught


ENGL 221: Brit Lit I
ENGL 223: Shakespeare
ENGL 288: Shakespeare & Film
ENGL 306: Medieval lit
ENGL309: Early Modern Lit
Senior Capstone