Dr. Jay Ruud chaired the English Department from 2003-2016. Prior to that, he served as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota. He holds a Ph.D. in Medieval Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and is married to the thoroughly awesome poet and novelist Prof. Stacey Margaret Jones, an instructor in the UCA English Department. He has two more or less adult children, and as many spectacular dogs as grandchildren (four).
A medievalist, Dr. Ruud published a number scholarly works, including an Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature (2006), A Critical Companion to Dante (2008), and A Critical Companion to Tolkien (2011), as well as the first full-length study of Chaucer’s short poems, “Many a Song and Many a Leccherous Lay”: Tradition and Individuality in Chaucer Lyric Poetry (1992), a book that was reissued by Routledge in October 2019. He’s spending his retirement doing a lot of travel—he’s been to all seven continents—but is now devoting much of his time to fiction writing. Dr. Ruud has retold the traditional legend of King Arthur for modern readers as a series of six Merlin Mysteries, the final volume of which, To the Great Deep, was published in the fall of 2020. He’s now begun a new series of Robin Hood mysteries, the first of which, Sleuth of Sherwood, was published in June 2022. Dr. Ruud is also a lifetime Chicago Cubs fan and dabbles in community theater, where he once played his own daughter’s mother.
Where can I find him?
You can follow Dr. Ruud’s work as a fiction writer on his author Facebook page, his Goodreads author page, or his author web site. You also can reach him via email at jruud@retired.uca.edu.