Academia

From Autumn 2022 I’ve taken up a new role as Lecturer in Environmental History at Bath Spa University in the School of Writing, Publishing and the Humanities.

Up until Summer 2022 I was Associate Professor of Medieval History and Literature, where I taught all sorts of things medieval and arctic, with a particular emphasis on the Vikings.

While at Durham University, I was Deputy Director of Durham’s Arctic Research Centre for Training and Interdisciplinary Collaboration (DurhamARCTIC), a doctoral research and training centre funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Three years of excellent doctoral students have now joined the programme, working on everything from polar law to the history of arctic exploration.

Formerly General Editor of ‘Borders, Boundaries and Landscapes’, a book series with Brepols (academic publishers). I was very lucky to have an interdisciplinary board of experts drawn from institutions around the world, and a world-class publishing manager who keeps the whole ship afloat. The book series is still going strong, currently under new (and improved) general editorship.

From 2015 to 2016 I was lucky enough to be a visiting research fellow in the Department of Scandinavian Studies, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

I’m a member of the research group ‘Creating the New North: Manifestations of Central Power in the North AD 500-1800’. This means I get to spend more time in Arctic Norway and hang out with interesting people, a state of affairs that makes me very happy.

I’m one of the founding members of the steering group for the University of the Arctic (UArctic) at Durham University, a network of universities, colleges, research institutes and other organisations concerned with education and research in and about the North.

As a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the English Faculty, I researched and wrote the book that would become Beyond the Northlands: Viking Voyages and the Old Norse Sagas, published with Oxford University Press in 2016.

I began collaborating with IASSA colleagues at the 7th International Congress of Arctic Social Sciences, held in Akureyri in Northern Iceland. Since then, we have had a lot of fun organising conference panels, co-writing journal articles and editing a book, Imagining the Supernatural North. We visit each other in our home countries and spend evenings introducing each other to local alcoholic specialities.

As an Extraordinary Junior Research Fellow at Queen’s, I had some Extraordinary Experiences, including creating an annual Yule Feast for the English Students and taking members of the college on a ‘Vikings v Anglo-Saxons’ roadtrip, where we re-enacted the Battle of Maldon in Essex and declaimed Beowulf on top of a burial mound at Sutton Hoo.

I spent many happy years in ASNC, immersed in the languages, literatures and cultures of what are sometimes called the ‘Dark Ages’. I specialised in Old Norse culture, language and literature, with a PhD in landscape and space in the Old Norse sagas. I was an undergraduate at Churchill College and a postgraduate at Pembroke College.

At Cambridge, my MPhil and PhD were funded by masters and doctoral awards from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.