Leonard Koff

Leonard Koff, Ph.D., an associate of the UCLA Center for Early Global Studies (formerly the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies), has academic degrees from Columbia College, Columbia University and University of California, Berkeley. He has taught and developed courses at UCLA, including Homer and James Joyce, the Literature of Existentialism, Technology and Human Values, Depictions of Power, and Banned Books, as well as courses in Comparative Literature’s several-part humanities sequence: Western literature from Antiquity to the 20th Century, and World Literature from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. 

Dr. Koff wrote Chaucer and the Art of Storytelling, published essays on medieval literature, the Italian trecento, and medievalism, and lectured in the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East on such subjects as literature and philosophy, the shared texts of Western religious identity (Jewish, Christian, Islamic), theories of translation, Cicero, Freud, and Emmanuel Levinas. He has also lectured on distance learning for the Ministry of Higher Education, Iraqi Kurdistan, and published “The Kurdish Mem u Zin and the Boundaries of Identity” in Essays on Kurdish Narratology and Folklore: Oral tradition, History, and Nationalism.

Dr. Koff is co-editor of two volumes in the Brill Presenting the Past series, the first called Mobs, in which his essay on Elias Canetti appears, and the second called Time: Sense, Space, Structure, which includes his essay, “No-Time in Non-Places.” His has been published in two MLA collections: Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower and Approaches to Teaching Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. He has also published six books of poetry, among them Breaking the Barrier, Uncommon Prayer, A Sequence in One Place, and Following a Father’s Death.

He received a Distinguished Instructor Award from UCLA Extension in 2009 and the Dean’s Award in 2019.