Kathryn Lynch

Kathryn (“Cappy”) Lynch, Bates/Hart Professor of English, has been a member of the Wellesley College faculty since 1983. Her primary research area is medieval English literature, with specialties in medieval dream poetry and in Chaucer. She is the author of The High Medieval Dream Vision: Poetry, Philosophy, and Literary Form and of Chaucer’s Philosophical Visions and numerous essays and reviews in academic journals. She is also the editor of a collection of essays about Chaucer and of the Norton Critical edition of Chaucer’s early poetry. She teaches a range of courses in the English Department, often touching on interdisciplinary topics like food and literature or poetry and philosophy. She also enjoys teaching writing, a skill that she views as indispensable for life and work.

From 2010 through 2017, Professor Lynch served as Dean of Faculty Affairs in the Office of the Provost, a stint in administration that deepened her interest in educational policy and in the plight of the humanities in current culture. Her editorials on these subjects have been published in The Washington Post and The Boston Globe.

Professor Lynch lives in the town of Wellesley. She is married to a Boston lawyer and has three children and two grandchildren.