Jeff Rider is a professor of the literature and history of medieval Europe. He specializes in Flemish history, the Arthurian legend and medievalism (the reception and uses of medieval artifacts in contemporary society).

Professor Rider is the author, editor or translator of twelve books and has published over forty-five articles, essays, or chapters in collective works. His most recent book is a translation and study of Walter of Thérouanne's “The Life of Count Charles of Flanders,” “The Life of Lord John, Bishop of Thérouanne” and Related Works (2024). His other major publications include God’s Scribe: The Historiographical Art of Galbert of Bruges (2001), an edition of Galbert of Bruges’s De multro, traditione et occisione gloriosi Karoli comitis Flandriarum (1994) and a translation of this same work: The Murder, Betrayal, and Slaughter of the Glorious Charles, Count of Flanders (2013). He has also edited Walter of Thérouanne’s Vita Karoli comitis Flandrie et Vita domni Ioannis Morinensis episcopi (2006) and co-edited and co-translated the thirteenth-century Lai du conseil (2013). He is the editor or co-editor of several collective volumes including Obscurity in Medieval Texts (2013), The Inner Life of Women in Medieval Romance Literature: Grief, Guilt and Hypocrisy (2011), Le Diocèse de Thérouanne au Moyen Age (2010), and Galbert of Bruges and the Historiography of Medieval Flanders (2009).

He has a forthcoming volume devoted to The Earliest Genealogies and Histories of the Counts of Flanders (Brussels: Royal Historical Commission). He is currently at work on an edition of Andreas of Marchiennes' Succinct History of the Deeds and Succession of the French Kings and a book on The Usefulness of the Middle Ages.

Professor Rider has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Commission, the American Philosophical Society, the Rotary Foundation, and the Belgian Fondation Nationale de Recherche Scientifique. He has held residential fellowships at the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts, St. Deiniol’s/Gladstone’s Library, the Fondation des Treilles, and the Herzog August Bibliothek. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes – Saint-Denis, the University of Paris Est Créteil, the University of Lille III, the Catholic University of Louvain, the Charles University (Prague), the University of Ghent, the University of Southern Denmark, and the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (Lima).

A graduate of Yale University in combined French and English literature, he received a Diplôme d’études médiévales from the Université Catholique de Louvain and a master’s and doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Chicago. He also attended Deep Springs College and took three years of courses at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis. His teaching specialties are medieval and Renaissance French literature, the Arthurian legend, and medieval Flemish history.

At Wesleyan, Professor Rider has served as chair of the Romance Languages and Literatures Department and the Medieval Studies Program, and has been the resident director of the Wesleyan Program in Paris numerous times. He has chaired the Educational Policy Committee, the Faculty Committee on Rights and Responsibilities, and the Review and Appeals Board (personnel). He has also served on the Advisory Committee (personnel), the Compensation and Benefits Committee, the Committee on Honors and the Faculty Student Affairs Committee.