Hannah Bailey

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.

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.

Hannah's research interests are in Early Medieval literature, mainly Old English and Early Middle English poetry. She has published on Cynewulf and related old English poems, Beowulf, Laȝamon’s Brut, and Havelok the Dane. She is particularly interested in puzzling out the meanings and connotations of unusual words, and in what the use of poetic and narrative conventions can reveal about poets’ processes and influences. She also has an interest in landscape and place names and her current project explores the significance of watersheds in narratives about Early Medieval English saints. Hannah was co-founder of an interdisciplinary research network on Architectural Representation in the Middle Ages, which produced a special issue of Leeds Studies in English (2017) and the book Architectural Representation in Medieval Textual and Material Culture (2023).

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