John V. Fleming

John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild, '24 Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature emeritus at Princeton University, where he taught for forty years before retiring in 2006. Fleming graduated from Sewanee (the University of the South) in 1958, before spending three years in Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. After taking his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1963, he taught for two years at the University of Wisconsin (Madison). He has published widely in the fields of medieval literature, art history, and religious history. As a teacher he was particularly well-known for his unusual course in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. In retirement he has begun to publish, outside medieval studies, on subjects which he has long pursued on an amateur basis. He is a former president of the Medieval Academy of America and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He and his wife Joan, a retired Episcopal priest--whose thumb, one hopes in "up" position, is in the author photograph--are the parents of three adult children. They live in Princeton, N.J., and spend extended periods of time in Paris. Fleming is the recent recipient of a Mellon Foundation Fellowship for Emeriti Faculty (affectionately known as a Geezer Grant) which he hopes will allow him to complete a book about the religious poetry of Luis de Camões. He is actively involved in several other scholarly projects, and he is beginning a second trade book for the W. W. Norton Co., the publishers of The Anti-Communist Manifestos. There is more, including a portal to his weekly blog, at www.johnvfleming.com.