I retired from the Department in 2003 after twenty-six years on the faculty, after having served in all three ranks of the professorship, and I recently wound up my teaching career as Professor of Humanities at the University of Wisconsin - Madison.  As someone whose degrees are from U.C. Berkeley (BA in English, 1967; PhD in Comparative Literature, 1972), I have indelible memories of the years I spent here, from the time I first walked into classes taught by the likes of Thom Gunn and Alain Renoir until recent years. I am grateful to the colleagues from whom I absorbed so many insights over that time.

I continue to work on projects that fascinate me. These mostly have to do with the origins of English literature  in the period of cultural synthesis that followed the adoption of Christianiity by the Germanic-speaking peoples of Britain (Beowulf and all that), and also with the role of oral narrative in the creation and evolution of collective memory, as exemplified by Scotland's travelling people, or tinkers.

Chief Books

1. Beowulf: The Poem and Its Tradition.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.

2. Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature.  Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.  Paperback edition, 2010.               

3. Old English Enigmatic Poems and the Play of the Texts.  Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols. 2006. 

4. Old English Heroic Poems and the Social Life of Texts.  Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2007.

5. Beowulf and Lejre.  Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2007.

6. The Idea of Anglo Saxon England 1066-1901: Remembering, Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015.

7. Old English Literature: A Guide to Criticism with Selected Readings. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016.

8. God’s Exiles and English Verse: On the Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2019.

9. Webspinner: Songs, Stories, and Reflections of Duncan Williamson, Scottish Traveller. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2022.

Chief Editions

1. Old English Literature in Context: Ten Essays. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1980.

2. A Beowulf Handbook.  Co-edited with Robert E. Bjork.  Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.

3. Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity.  Co-edited with Allen J. Frantzen.  Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997.  

4. Beowulf: An Illustrated Edition.  New York: Norton, 2008. With Seamus Heaney’s translation of the poem.

5. Klaeber’s Beowulf.  4^th edition. Co-edited with R. D. Fulk and Robert E. Bjork. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008.

6. The Genesis of Books: Studies in the Scribal Culture of Medieval England in Honour of A.N. Doane.  Co-edited with Matthew T. Hussey.  Turnhout: Brepols, 2011.

7. Anglo-Saxon England and the Visual Imagination. Co-edited with Stacy S. Klein and Jonathan Wilcox. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2016.

I am one of an international team of four scholars editing the corpus of the earliest English medical texts for publication by the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library. Due out in 2023 is Medical Texts from Early Medieval England, Volume I: The Old English Herbal, Lacnunga, and Other Texts, edited and translated by Maria A. D’Aronco and myself (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press).

Concurrently, since my retirement from Berkeley in 2003 and from the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 2011, I have been researching the archaeology of Iron-Age Eurasia with an eye to putting pressure on the category of the “Germanic” — one that has long been enshrined in Anglo-Saxon studies to the possible strait-jacketing of that field.

Much of my current is devoted to the selective publication of fieldwork that I undertook with traditional singers and storytellers in Scotland from 1984 to 1993. My recent book Webspinner: Songs, Stories, and Reflections of Duncan Williamson, Scottish Traveller (University Press of Mississippi, 2022) results from that effort. The book is linked to a website, Scottish Voices, sponsored by the Digital Collections Center of the University of Wisconsin Libraries, that provides public access to a comprehensive selection of still photos, audio clips, and video clips relating to Williamson and other traditional Scottish singers, storytellers, and musicians.

No recent courses taught.