Kathryn Lynch

Kathryn Lynch has been a professor in the Wellesley College English Department for 42 years. From 2010-17, she served as the dean of the arts and humanities at Wellesley, and from 2018-2020, she was director of the Wellesley College Freedom Project, an initiative to support viewpoint diversity on the Wellesley campus. She is a founding member of the Academic Freedom Alliance. Her scholarly specialty is medieval English literature, especially the poetry of the 'father of English poetry,' Geoffrey Chaucer. She is the author or editor of three books on medieval literature and the editor of the widely used Norton critical edition, Chaucer's Dream Visions and Other Poems. She has also written numerous articles and book reviews, which have appeared not only in premier medieval journals like Speculum, The Chaucer Review, and Studies in the Age of Chaucer, but in addition she has published reviews and opinion pieces on issues of importance in higher education for publications such as The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Society.