Beowulf By All: a Community Translation
Published this summer was Beowulf By All: a Community Translation, edited by Treharne, and Stanford former doctoral student—Jean Abbott, and former Stanford Text Technologies Fellow, Mateusz Fafinski.
The book was conceived as a rejection of the elitism, sexism and racism in the field of Early English Studies. An open call for translators of the eleventh-century Old English poem, Beowulf, resulted in more than two hundred contributors coming forward to offer their translations of the story of the hero, Beowulf, and his slaying of a sequence of monstrous opponents. Our participants range from interested members of the public, to undergraduates in Old English classes, advanced researchers, and senior medievalists. It’s a tale of what can happen when the community comes together to offer new, dynamic work on this old, but brilliant, literary masterpiece.
About the Author
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 completing new research on Neil Ripley Ker, his Catalogue of Manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon, and his methods as a manuscript 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.
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 “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. I am also PI of CyberText Technologies (https://digitalker.stanford.edu); on a project investigating the complex subject of personal archives—SOPES; and Medieval Networks of Memory with Mateusz Fafinski, which analyzes two thirteenth-century mortuary rolls. Text Technologies' initiatives include a regular Collegium: 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/).
In 2024-2025, I’m delighted to be a Stanford Impact Labs Design Fellow, developing archival tools and guidelines. I’m also the President of the Teachers of Old English in Britain and Ireland (TOEBI). 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 Association (and former Chair and President); and a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.