Stan Benfell

Office Hours:
Mondays 10:00-11:00
JFSB 3027

Wednesdays, 10:00-11:00
JFSB 3027

Commonly Taught Courses

CmLit 211, 212, 420R (Renaissance lit, medieval lit.), 430R (epic, romance), 450R (representations of the divine)

Biography

Stan Benfell received his B.A. in Comparative Literature from BYU in 1987. He went on to graduate school at New York University, where he received M.A. (1990) and Ph.D. (1994) degrees. While writing his dissertation, he spent a year in Italy as a Fulbright scholar. He has been teaching Comparative Literature at BYU since 1994, teaching 201 and 202, as well as upper-division courses in his specialty of late medieval and Renaissance literature. He recently spearheaded the development (along with affiliated faculty member Scott Miller) of the new Comparative Literature Civilzation sequence CmLit 211 and 212. He has published many articles on medieval and Renaissance literature, and his book-length study on Dante and the Bible, The Biblical Dante, was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2011. In 2004, he was a fellow in a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar on the Seven Deadly Sins in Cambridge, England; and in 2017 he was a fellow in the NEH seminar on King Lear and Shakespeare Studies, held at the University of Chicago.  He has been involved with many Study Abroad programs; most recently, he directed BYU’s Study Abroad program in London during summer and fall 2014. His research is concerned with moral and religious philosophy and literature in late medieval and Renaissance Europe. He is currently working on a project concerning Renaissance literature and philosophical skepticism. He is the section head for Comparative Literature.

Degrees

PhD, New York University,1994
MA, New York University,1990
BA, Brigham Young University,1987

Interests

Medieval and Renaissance Literature (French, Italian, and English); religion and literature; philosophy and literature