William Calin was a Retired Graduate Research Professor of French in the department from 1988 to 2018.
William Calin began his tenure at the University of Florida as a Graduate Research Professor in 1988, and from 1998 to 2001 he served as a Florida Foundation Research Professor. He taught at Dartmouth College, Stanford University, and the University of Oregon; was twice Visiting Professor at the University of Poitiers; was Edward Arnold Visiting Professor at Whitman College; and was a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall in Cambridge, the Institute for Advance Studies in the Humanities in Edinburgh, and the Northrop Frye Centre and the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies in Toronto. He was awarded eleven national and international grants, including ACLS, APS, Fulbright, Guggenheim, NEH, and Woodrow Wilson, and was, for nine years, International Vice President of the Association Internationale d’Études Occitanes. He worked on medieval French literature; French poetry from the Renaissance to the present; Franco-British literary relations, Middle Ages and Renaissance; literature in Breton, Occitan, and lowland Scots; medievalism; and criticism. He authored twelve books and 120 articles, some reprinted, and delivered 230 conference papers and lectures, a number of these more than once. They include fourteen plenary session addresses and sixty-nine public lectures at universities. A Muse for Heroes was awarded the Gilbert Chinard First Literary Prize 1981; A Muse for Heroes and The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England received the American Library Association Outstanding Academic Book of the Year award. His most recent volumes are Minority Literatures and Modernism: Scots, Breton, and Occitan, 1920-1990; The Twentieth-Century Humanist Critics, from Spitzer to Frye; and The Lily and the Thistle: The French Tradition and the Older Literature of Scotland. Recent projects included “Essays in Medievalism,” “Studies in Occitan Literature: the Baroque; the Felibrige,” and “Readings in French Poetry of the Eighteenth Century.” He also served on doctoral committees at the Université de Pau and the State University of Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia.