About

My primary research and teaching interests include Old and Middle English, Anglo-Latin, Old Saxon and Old Norse-Icelandic literature, as well as folkloric and modern receptions of the medieval world. I am particularly interested in poetics, violence, domesticity, animals and the natural world.

As part of my postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto, I completed revisions to a monograph based on my PhD thesis, entitled Weaving Words and Binding Bodies: The Poetics of Human Experience in Old English Literature. In addition, I continued to research other medieval languages and literatures, exploring in particular Old Norse-Icelandic, Anglo-Saxon (Old English and Anglo-Latin) and Middle English literary examples in which textile workers are associated with deception and violence. During this time, I also co-founded ‘The Riddle Ages’, a blog about Anglo-Saxon riddles. The aim of this project is to provide public access to translations and commentary of the Exeter Book riddles. See http://theriddleages.wordpress.com/.

As a Junior Research Fellow at Durham University and Departmental Lecturer at Oxford University, I began working on a project that engages with the emerging field of interdisciplinary animal studies. The publications resulting from this study will highlight the way perceptions of a range of animals from spiders to wolves are shaped by the human writers of literature and shed light on broader, cultural implications that are relevant today. I am continuing this project as a Birmingham Fellow.