Broadly interested in the ways medieval texts survive in the modern world, Scala works at the intersection of medieval and post-medieval studies, a way of thinking about literary history that encompasses and defies traditional historical boundaries of English Studies. Scala seeks to understand the ways medieval texts remain with us, in whatever disguised and altered forms and in new media. Her classes include the plays of Shakespeare, gothic and Romantic medievalism, Victorian book history, children’s fantasy literature, and modern film. But she also teaches the medieval texts themselves, along with their classical precursors, to show students how much the issues that they care about now are alive in some of the earliest literary productions the West knows.
Scala’s own work focuses on Chaucer, critical theory, and the textual environments in which Chaucer’s work proliferates and survives in both medieval and modern material forms. She has become interested in and teach with the Renaissance editions of Chaucer, of which we have a unique archive available at UT in the Harry Ransom Center’s Pforzheimer Collection. These form part of one current research project, Shakespeare and the Renaissance Chaucer Book, which seeks to understand the playwright’s use of the medieval poet in the context of early modern book culture. Part of this project rappeared in the newly redesigned TSLL. (https://utpress.utexas.edu/journals/texas-studies-in-literature-and-language) in 2018.