Louise M Bishop (PhD, Fordham University, 1984) is Associate Professor Emerita of Literature at the Robert D. Clark Honors College. A native of New Jersey and award-winning teacher, her academic training focused on the European Middle Ages. She has treated in both her research and her teaching fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Middle English poetry and prose, including the poetry and prose of Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, and Reginald Pecock, along with anonymous works that abound in a manuscript era.

Her book Words, Stones and Herbs: The Healing Word in Medieval and Early Modern England (Syracuse University Press, 2007) considers ideas about and practices of healing in Middle English poetry and prose, exploring the cognitive and physical effects of words in the healing process. The “afterlives” of Chaucer and Langland in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, as well as medieval-themed movies and “medievalism” generally, animate her thinking. Her interests include sixteenth-century Britain, early to late, including the run-up to the Tudor dynasty and its memorialization in theatre, including Shakespeare's. She has explored conceptions of the heart and its centrality to the health of body and mind as expressed in medieval and early modern literature.

Bishop has developed graduate and undergraduate courses on the medieval dream vision, Middle English mystics, medieval movies, medieval travel—pilgrimage and crusade, medievalism, and medieval healing under such titles as “Inventing the Middle Ages” and “The Idea of the Vernacular.” In 1996 Bishop taught for the UO in Avignon, France. In concert with Keble College, University of Oxford, she developed and supervised the Clark Honors College's tutorial-based Trinity-term CHC@Oxford program from 2014 through 2018.

Besides serving as Associate Dean of the CHC three times (2008-2011; 2013-2014; 2016-2017), Bishop's professional activity has included travel to several European countries; Accra, Ghana; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and the states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu in India.