Elaine Treharne

Roberta Bowman Denning Professor and Professor, by courtesy, of German Studies and of Comparative Literature
Senior Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education (VPUE)
1st Class B.A. (Hons), University of Manchester, English Language and Literature (1986)
Master of Archive Administration, University of Liverpool, Department of History (1987)
PhD, University of Manchester, Department of English (1992)

I am a Welsh medievalist with specializations in manuscript studies, archives, information technologies, and early British literature. I have published widely in this area, focusing on religious poetry and prose, and manuscripts from c.600 to c.1300. I teach core courses in British Literary History, on Text Technologies, and Palaeography and Archival Studies. I supervise honors students and graduate students working in early literature, Book History, and Digital Humanities and I am committed to providing a supportive and ethical environment in all my work. My current projects focus on death and trauma, on manuscripts and on the long history of writing systems. I am co-editing a revised version of N. R. Ker’s Catalogue of Manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon for Oxford University Press (2025). I recently published Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book with OUP in 2021; A Very Short Introduction to Medieval Literature (OUP, 2015); Living Through Conquest: The Politics of Early English (OUP, 2012); and the Cambridge Companion to British Medieval Manuscripts, co-edited with Dr Orietta Da Rold for CambridgeUP in 2020.

I am the Director of Stanford Text Technologies (https://texttechnologies.stanford.edu), and, with Claude Willan, published Text Technologies: A History in 2019 (StanfordUP). Other projects include CyberText Technologies; research into the long history of personal archives; and Medieval Networks of Memory with Mateusz Fafinski, which analyzes two thirteenth-century mortuary rolls. Text Technologies' initiatives include an annual collegium now in its seventh year: the first, on “Distortion” was published as Textual Distortion in 2017; the fourth was published by Routledge as Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age in 2020. I am the Principal Investigator of the NEH-Funded 'Stanford Global Currents' (https://globalcurrents.stanford.edu/) and Co-PI of the AHRC-funded research project and ebook, The Production and Use of English Manuscripts, 1060 to 1220 (Leicester, 2010; version 2.0 https://em1060.stanford.edu/). With Benjamin Albritton, I run Stanford Manuscript Studies; and with Thomas Mullaney and Kathryn Starkey, I co-direct SILICON (https://silicon.stanford.edu/).

I have been an American Philosophical Society Franklin Fellow, a Princeton Procter Fellow, and a Fellow of the Stanford Clayman Institute for Gender Studies. I'm a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries; a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society; an Honorary Lifetime Fellow of the English Assocation (and former Chair and President); and a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. In April 2021, I became a Trustee of the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth (https://www.llgc.org.uk/).

Contact

Telephone
(650) 723-4609
Office
460-340

Office Hours

By appointment

Research Interests

Specialization(s)
British Literature-Poetry
British Literature-Prose
Old and Middle English
History of the Book

Courses