Disrupting Categories, 1050-1250
Disrupting Categories, just published by Elaine Treharne, uses a series of medieval texts—from the first short story in English (c.1150) to the Magna Carta and The Grave—to address critical issues in the Humanities centring on categories of L/literature, history, fact and fiction, periodization, originality and adapation, and the aesthetics of script. These categories, inherited from the foundations of our modern disciplines and fields of study, are superimposed onto what could be more flexible modes of investigation. Through a squence of cogent case studies, the book highlights how restrictive and hierarchical such scholarly categories can sometimes be.
About the Author
I’m a Welsh medievalist with specializations in manuscript and archival studies, information technologies, and early British literature. I teach core courses in British Literary History, on Text Technologies, and Palaeography and Archives. I supervise honors students and graduate students working in early literatures, Book History, and Computational 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 handwriting, and on the history of communication systems. I spent half of 2026 as a Research Fellow at Magdalen and Balliol Colleges in Oxford, where I worked extensively with the Bodleian Library’s Neil Ker Archive. This research will lead to a book called Medieval Manuscript Hunters, centering on Neil Ripley Ker and his international network of scholars, who sought to identify, save, and make accessible Britain’s written cultural record.
Upcoming publications include a new and revised fourth edition of my Old and Middle English c. 450-1450: An Anthology (with Wiley-Blackwell); and a second, revised edition of my Very Short Introduction to Medieval Literature (OUP). Most recently, I’ve 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, Shiva Mihan, and Mateusz Fafinski); and the Cambridge Companion to British Medieval Manuscripts, co-edited with Dr Orietta Da Rold for Cambridge 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), which, in the summer of 2026, has focused on Neil Ker’s correspondence. With a team of undergraduate researchers, hosted by CESTA, we have created a database of 10,000 letters in Ker’s archive written by humanities scholars from 1933 to 1982. It is a treasure trove of book historical data. The project involved refining AI for our research, and as a handwriting recognition tool. Other projects include Digital Ker—an online digitization and updating of Ker’s 1957 Catalogue of Manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon, together with newly published archival materials. Text Technologies also hosts 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 Sciences, 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; Stanford, 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. In 2026, I was delighted to be a Research Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford; Oliver Smithies Lecturer at Balliol College in Oxford; and the Humfrey Wanley Fellow at the Bodleian Library. 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); a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales; and an Honorary Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.