Lecturer

Biography

Klayton Tietjen is an ABD Ph.D. candidate and a Graduate Teaching Associate in the Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literature (French). He completed a Master’s degree in History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His research interests are in Old French literature and medieval French culture. He is currently researching and writing a dissertation entitled “Epic Identity Crisis: the Effects of Rebellious Narratives and Racial Discourse on Chivalric Culture in 12^th-century Chansons de Geste” where he explores how social pressures and anxieties informed narrative processes in epic literature and how those narratives shaped the identity of the intended audience of young knights. His advisor is Dr. Anne-Hélène Miller. He has been a recipient of the MARCO Paul Barrette Graduate Student Travel Prize, an MFLL Grant for Doctoral Research, the UT Student/Faculty Research Award, and the Tennessee Fellowship of Graduate Excellence.