Professor Edwin Duncan, Chair of the English Department, has been at Towson University since 1993 (except for the 1996-97 school year when he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Akron). His specializations are Medieval Literature and English Language & Linguistics, and he is the 2002 recipient of the USM (University System of Maryland) Regents' Award for Teaching Excellence. He has published articles in the top scholarly journals in his field (JEGP, Studies in Philology, etc.) and read papers at the top conferences (Modern Language Association, Linguistic Society of America, etc.). His most recent article, "Reaching Out: The Web as a Learning Tool," will appear in the upcoming issue of SMART (Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching).

He is past President of the Texas Medieval Association and currently a member of its Board of Directors. He is also a former President of the Southeast Texas Council of Teachers of English. He regularly attends academic conferences, most notably the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo and the Texas Medieval Conference, both of which he participates in almost every year. In 1995 he was the keynote speaker for the Annual Meeting of the College English Association - Middle Atlantic Group. He has appeared on WJZ-TV (Baltimore) and KFDM-TV (Beaumont, Tx) as a linguistics expert and has testified as one in court. He has also been interviewed by BBC International Radio (4:24) as an English language historian.

He is the Webmaster for the Texas Medieval Association and Co-Director of the Chaucer MetaPage (along with Professor Joseph Wittig of the University of North Carolina). He maintains web sites for all the courses he teaches, and in 1998 his English 425-Chaucer pages received an award from Links2Go (logo below) for being the best Chaucer site on the Internet.

A native Texan, he grew up as one of three sons of a cotton farmer and took his degrees at Texas Tech (B.A.) and the University of Texas (M.A., Ph.D.). He also spent five years travelling overseas (on two different trips). During that time he visited thirty countries, most of them in Europe and Asia. He spent time in such places as Afghanistan, Nepal, Laos, and the Seychelles Islands and worked at various jobs--as a waiter in Oslo, as a farm hand in Denmark, as a stunt man and extra for Hindi movies in Bombay, as Circulation Director for the Premier TV Guide of Thailand, and for a year as an English teacher for Buddhist monks at the Wat Hong monastery in Bangkok.

After returning from the second trip overseas, he worked as a construction carpenter for five years in Austin, Texas, before entering graduate school at the University of Texas, where he was both a student and an undergraduate instructor. Besides Towson, he has also taught on both graduate and undergraduate levels at Humboldt State University in northern California, at Lamar University in southeast Texas, and at the University of Akron in Ohio.

He is Chair of the English Department at Towson and is on a number of departmental, college, and university committees. He is an active member of the AAUP (American Association of University Professors) and has been the editor of the Towson chapter's newsletter.

He recently updated his web edition of the General Prologue to Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which is used at several universities in the United States and elsewhere (For a short video [1:48] introduction, choose one: broadband | dialup). He has also added some narrated slidecasts to his History of the English Language course website. He is teaching Comparative Grammar the first summer session. Divorced, he has three daughters: Vanya, 32, currently living in Denver and preparing for a move to Korea; Mary Grace, 24, who just received her Juris Doctor's degree from Vanderbilt and is living in Nashville; and Laurie, 22, who just graduated from Purdue with a degree in computer engineering and is currently travelling in Europe. He favors the Houston Rockets to win the NBA, the Texas Rangers the World Series, and the Dallas Cowboys or Baltimore Ravens the Super Bowl.