The Medievalism Onion: Layers of Interpretation

This post was reblogged from TORCH. Thank you to TORCH and Oxford Medieval Studies for the invitation to write a post for them, and for permission to share it here. It's an introduction to my current project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. When you hear or read words like ‘medieval’ or ‘Middle Ages’, which images …

‘Objectifying’ the English-language ‘Nibelungenlied’

Scholars, translators, antiquarians, and children’s authors were some of the many anglophone writers who decided to put pen to paper and recreate the Nibelungenlied in English over the course of the long nineteenth century. This variety isn’t just reflected in the content of the texts they produced, but in the material form of the books …

Medieval Stories for Victorian Children (Dublin History Festival 2018)

In October, I was invited to participate in one of the Irish Research Council's sessions at the Dublin History Festival. My task was to tell a general audience about my work in five minutes, with the help of five PowerPoint slides. I decided to talk about two children's adaptations of the thirteenth-century German epic, the Nibelungenlied, …

I Know What The Medievalists Did Last (and Every) Summer….

I have recently written a blog post about Leeds International Medieval Congress for the Irish Humanities Alliance, for their 'Busy Season' series: Lectures have ended, exams are corrected, just what do academics do all summer? Fieldwork and research, write books and articles, organise and attend conferences, update next year’s courses, supervise postgraduate dissertations, overhaul websites… For …

Aachen Cathedral (and associated thoughts)

Two weeks ago I moved to Berlin with my husband. We are planning to be here until August, while I work on a project part-funded by the DAAD, during which time I will be a postdoctoral researcher at the Großbritannien-Zentrum, part of the Humboldt University. We decided to drive from Oxford to Berlin, stopping in …