Professor Elaine Treharne
Core subject area: British medieval literatures and material culture; twentieth-century Welsh-Anglo poetry; the long history of global text technologies.
Research interests: My core research concerns the production and use of British medieval manuscripts and Old English literature. I’ve published numerous books and articles in this area, including most recently Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book (OUP, 2021); the Cambridge Companion to British Medieval Manuscripts (CUP, 2020); and Disrupting Categories, 1050–1250 (ARC, 2024). One current project is Death of a Nun: Medieval Networks of Memory which focuses on thirteenth-century Mortuary Rolls that collect prayers for two recently deceased prioresses. I am following in the actual footsteps of the person who travelled the length and breadth of Britain gathering prayers of condolence from five hundred religious houses, which include the handwritten entries of many women scribes. Another project, and the reason I am a Fellow in Oxford in 2026, is ‘Manuscript Hunter’: Neil Ripley Ker and the Heritage of British Books, 1930–1982 — a book-length study of Oxford palaeographer, N.R. Ker, and the large network of scholars who discovered, traced, catalogued, and, in many cases, saved medieval and early modern British books, especially during the Second World War. I am also the director of several digital and computational projects, such as ’Stanford Global Currents’ and ’The Production and Use of English, c. 1020 to 1220’, on the history of text technologies and medieval manuscripts.