He was educated at the University of Regensburg, Germany, and Williams College, USA, where he studied English and German literature and linguistics with Karl Heinz Göller, Maureen Fries, Otto Hietsch, Gerhard Hahn, Sherron Knopp, Ernst von Reusner, and Hans Dieter Schäfer.
He received his PhD at Regensburg in 1990 and then garnered a German Academic Exchange Service Teaching Grant to help reestablish English Studies in Dresden, East Germany, after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
More specifically, he finds in certain features of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Canterbury Tales echoes of late medieval nominalist mentalities, a strand of thought cultural historians such as Rosario Assunto, Friedrich Heer, Erwin Panofsky, Sheila Delany, and Hans Blumenberg count among the decisive factors ushering in the formation of modern Europe.
"[6] However, perhaps more important than the bio-bibliographic detail, the study demonstrates how (German) philology, rather than being sine ira et studio, was intimately involved with the goals of Germany as an increasingly aggressive nation state.
In fact, Utz demonstrates how Germany's actual territorial incursions into Africa, China, and Alsace-Lorraine could be seen as quite similar to German philologists' colonization of academic space via rather bellicose research agendas and methodologies.
Finally, Utz provides hitherto unknown information about the scholarship and relationships among some of the most productive medievalists in the German-speaking and Anglo-American world: A.C. Baugh, Henry Bradshaw, Alois Brandl, Ernst Robert Curtius, Ewald Flügel, Frederick James Furnivall, Eugen Kölbing, Wilhelm Hertzberg, Johann August Hermann (John) Koch, Hugo Lange, Victor Langhans, Arnold Schröer, Walter W. Skeat, Bernhard Ten Brink, and Julius Zupitza.
Workman and Kathleen Verduin, later with Tom Shippey, Elizabeth Emery, Gwendolyn Morgan, Ed Risden, and Karl Fugelso, Utz shaped the work of the International Society for the Study of Medievalism, as whose President he served from 2009 to 2020.