Elaine Treharne

Roberta Bowman Denning Professor of Humanities

Professor of English, and, 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’m a Welsh medievalist with specializations in manuscript studies, archives, information technologies, and early British literature. 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 history of writing systems. I’m currently working on a new book that focuses on contemporary European Manuscript Studies, its debt to Neil Ripley Ker, and his methods and impact as a scholar. I recently published Disrupting Categories, 1050 to 1250: Rethinking the Humanities through Premodern Texts (ARC Humanities Press, 2024); 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). Also recently published is the two-part issue 13 (2024) of Digital Philology on “Fragmentology” (with Ben Albritton and Shiva Mihan); and the Cambridge Companion to British Medieval Manuscripts, co-edited with Dr Orietta Da Rold for CambridgeUP in 2020.

Since 2013, I have been the Director of Stanford Text Technologies, and, with Claude Willan, published Text Technologies: A History in 2019 (StanfordUP). A new initiative is HANDMADE (Handwriting Analysis through New Directions in Manuscript Studies with AI and Digital Environments). This will be hosted by CESTA at Stanford and seeks to describe, evaluate, and refine handwriting recognition tools for textual objects of all periods. Other projects include Digital Ker—an online digitization and updating of Neil R. Ker’s 1957 Catalogue of Manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon, together with newly published archival materials of Ker’s; and, with Stanford undergraduate RAs, Stanford Ordinary People Extraordinary Stories (SOPES), which investigates the complex subject of personal and community archives. With Mateusz Fafinski, Medieval Networks of Memory analyzes two thirteenth-century mortuary rolls, upon which I am writing a short book tracing the footsteps of the roll-carriers around Britain. With Benjamin Albritton, I run Stanford Manuscript Studies, where we highlight Stanford University Libraries’ world-class manuscript collections for students and community members. I am also the Co-PI of the NEH-Funded 'Stanford Global Currents' and of the AHRC-funded research project and ebook, The Production and Use of English Manuscripts, 1060 to 1220 (Leicester, 2010; version 2.0).

I work a great deal with, and for, the Stanford Alumni Association, leading Study Tours and seminars; and in 2023, I was delighted to win the Lyman Award for this. I’m the current President of the Teachers of Old English in Britain and Ireland (TOEBI); I’ve been an American Philosophical Society Franklin Fellow, a Princeton Procter Fellow, a Fellow of the Stanford Clayman Institute for Gender Studies, and a Stanford Impact Labs Fellow. I’m a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries; a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society; an Honorary Lifetime Fellow of the English Association (and former Chair and President); and a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.