R. Howard Bloch is a Sterling Professor of French and Chair of Medieval Studies at Yale. For many years he directed the Humanities Program and the Directed Studies Program. Having studied at Amherst College and Stanford, he taught at SUNY-Buffalo, UC-Berkeley, and Columbia University, before settling in the 06511 zip code. He is the author of many books on medieval and modern literature, most recently A Needle in the Right Hand of God: The Norman Conquest of 1066 and the Making and Meaning of the Bayeux Tapestry (Random House, 2006) and One Toss of the Dice: The Incredible Story of How a Poem Made Us Modern (W. W. Norton, 2016).
