This is the typescript of the Introductory chapter of the book, THE INVENTION OF RACE IN THE EUROPEAN MIDDLE AGES, published on March 8, 2018 by Cambridge UP (503 pp., 8 chapters, 10″ x 7″ format). The book discusses Jews, Muslims, Africans and blackness, Native Americans, Mongols, and the Romani (“Gypsies”) in 7 chapters, including a critical…[Read more]

This syllabus for a very standard course (lit survey of British literature from the Romantic period to the present) is unusual only because its assigned texts are all available open-access. I worked with one of the reference librarians and a work-study student at Lesley’s Sherrill Library to get academically sound editions that were also open…[Read more]

This chapter assesses the evolution of the digitized manuscript from fragmented data to increasingly accessible and interoperable forms. The long view of media history and the tenets of the emerging field of media archaeology frame this exploration, considering how digital representations of manuscripts function as a kind of incunable – an e…[Read more]

What forgotten forms can philology assume anew? Reassessing how early medieval writers loved words differently than we do reveals significant gaps between past and presence senses of the physical phenomena words can index. In the early medieval language of Old English texts there remains a largely uncharted capacity for less linguistically driven…[Read more]

A contribution to Beowulf by All.
Ed. Elaine Treharne; a collaborative translation of the poem, for The Electronic Beowulf (2018)

Written for a special issue of English Studies, on “Women’s Bodies in Anglo-Saxon England,” eds. Robin Norris, Rebecca Stephenson & Renée Trilling

This essay dives deep into the events of S. 1377, a late tenth-century Anglo-Saxon charter that recounts the execution of a widow, probably for witchcraft, on the southeast border of the collap…[Read more]