My research interests are in Old and Middle English, Medieval literature more generally, the early history of English, cultural and religious history, English and other languages. I am concerned to show that early English literature is full and varied, and that there are many connections with and challenges to the literature and culture of the present day.
I have been at Regent’s since 2003, after earlier teaching and research at Cologne, York, Brussels and Manchester. Since 2012, I have also taught the English language for Mansfield College, Oxford. More recently, I have become Visiting Professor of Medieval English Literature at the University of Düsseldorf, Germany, dividing my time between Oxford and Düsseldorf during the winter semester 2016-17.
My role in College
I teach undergraduates studying for the BA in English, on Old English (Anglo-Saxon) literature and the English language; in other words, the linguistics of English, the nature of English as a language, its differences to other languages, its grammar, style and rich lexicon.
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Selected Publications
Books
- The Making of England: A New History of the Anglo-Saxon World (London: I. B. Tauris, 2017)
- There and Back Again: J. R. R. Tolkien and the Origins of the Hobbit (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012)
- Teach Yourself Complete Old English (Anglo-Saxon) (London: Hodder, 2010)
- Ed., Celts and Christians: New Approaches to the Religious Traditions of Britain and Ireland (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002)
- Trans. and Intro., Hildegard of Bingen: Selected Writings (London: Penguin Classics, 2001)
Articles and Research Papers
- ‘Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 201 as a Mirror for a Prince: Apollonius of Tyre, Archbishop Wulfstan and King Cnut’, English Studies, 97.5 (2016), pp. 451-72
- ‘Tolkien and Old English’, in S. Lee, ed., A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014)
- ‘Urban Perspectives in Late Anglo-Saxon Literature’, in G. Owen-Crocker, ed., Anglo-Saxon Towns: Essays in Memory of David Hill (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2014)
- ‘Coins, Merchants and the Reeve: Royal Authority in the Old English Legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus’, in G. Owen-Crocker and B. W. Schneider, eds, Royal Authority in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2013)
- ‘Imaginative Science: The Interactions of Henry Sweet’s Linguistic Thought and E. B. Tylor’s Anthropology’, Historiographia Linguistica, 37.1/2 (2010), pp. 64-104
- '"The Globe of Language": Thomas Prendergast and Applied Linguistics in the 1870s’, Language and History 53.1 (2010), pp. 15-26
- ‘Priming the Poets: the Making of Henry Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader’, in D. Clark and N. Perkins, eds, Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010), pp. 31-49
- '"To observe things as they are without regard to their origin": Henry Sweet’s general writings on language in the 1870s’, Bulletin of the Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas 51 (November 2008), pp. 41-58
- ‘Mentions of Offa in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Beowulf and Widsith’, in D. Hill and M. Worthington, eds, Æthelbald and Offa: Two Eighth-Century Kings of Mercia, BAR Reports British Series 383 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2005)
- ‘The Sources of the Vercelli Homilies, Blickling Homilies I, II, III, the Old English Rogationtide Homilies, Belfour Homily VI, and Ælfric's De temporibus anni’, in Fontes Anglo-Saxonici, CD-Rom Version 1.1 (Oxford, 2002)
- ‘Quoting and Re-Quoting: How the Use of Sources Affects Stylistic Choice in Old English Prose’, Studia Neophilologica 72 (2000), pp. 6-17
- ‘King Alfred's Approach to the Study of Latin’, in D. Cram, A. Linn and E. Nowak, eds, History of Linguistics, 2: From Classical to Contemporary Linguistics (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999), pp. 15-22
- ‘Sweet, Henry’, in M. Lapidge, et al., eds, The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998; 2nd edn, 2013)
- ‘Dictionaries, Old English’, in M. Lapidge, et al., eds, The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998; 2nd edn, 2013)
- ‘The Image of the Temple in the Psychomachia and Late Old English Literature’, The Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 79.3 (1997), pp. 263-85
- ‘Henry Sweet's Psychology of Language Learning’, in K. D. Dutz and H-J. Niederehe, eds, Theorie und Rekonstruction (Münster: Nodus, 1996), pp. 149-68
- ‘Being Scientific and Relevant in the Language Textbook: Henry Sweet's Primers for the Study of Colloquial English’, Paradigm 20 (1996), pp. 1-20
- '"Grasping Sentences as Wholes": Henry Sweet’s Idea of Language Study in the Middle Ages’, Neuphilogische Mitteilungen 96.2 (1995), pp. 177-85
- ‘The Figure of the Archer in Beowulf', Neophilologus 77 (1993), pp. 653-57