Hannah Bailey

Lecturer in English Language and Literature

Biography

Hannah joined Wadham in 2017 after several years teaching at other Oxford colleges. She completed her DPhil at Jesus College, Oxford, her MA at the University of York, and her BA at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts.

Her research interests are in Early Medieval literature, mainly Old English and Early Middle English poetry. She is particularly interested in what the use of poetic and narrative conventions can reveal about poets’ processes and influences, and in Old English poets’ engagement with patristic tropes concerning understanding and misunderstanding. She also has an interest in landscape and place names and has been working on the significance of watersheds in narratives about Early Medieval English saints. Hannah is a co-founder of an interdisciplinary research network on Architectural Representation in the Middle Ages, and co-editor of a book on that theme coming out with ARC Humanities Press.

Hannah’s main teaching responsibilities at Wadham are the first-year papers Prelims Paper 1A: Introduction to English Language, which introduces students to aspects of historical linguistics and sociolinguistics, and Prelims Paper 2: Early Medieval Literature (650–1350), which introduces students to Old and Early Middle English language and literature. She also sometimes teaches the second-year Middle English paper as well as the optional second-year Old English paper, and supervises undergraduate dissertations on topics that fall within the Early Medieval period.

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