Plenary Speakers

Susan Irvine is Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London. Educated at the University of Otago, New Zealand, and at the University of Oxford, where she completed her doctorate, she was a Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, before moving to UCL. She teaches Old English prose and poetry both at undergraduate and graduate level, and supervises research students on areas such as the prose of King Alfred’s reign, biblical narratives and Beowulf. One of the world's leading experts on Old English language and literature, she is the author of four standard editions of Old English literature: Old English Homilies from MS Bodley 343 (1993), The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Volume 7: MS E (2004), The Old English Boethius: An Edition of the Old English Versions of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae (2 vols., 2009) and The Old English Boethius with Verse Prologues and Epilogues (2012), the latter two jointly with Malcolm R. Godden. Other relevant publications include Beowulf Repunctuated (2000), co-authored with Bruce Mitchell, as well as essential chapters on the history of English language and literature up to the twelfth century. She has promoted the electronic edition of Old English texts as Director of Old English for the Fontes Anglo-Saxonici and as co-founder of the Electronic Corpus of Homilies in Old English project. Prof Irvine has been Vice-President of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, is a member of the Council of the Early English Text Society, and has received the 2011 ISAS Prize for ‘Best Edition, 2007-09' and the 2015 Anneliese Maier Humboldt Research Award, among other honours. She is currently completing an edition of the Alfredian prologues and epilogues for Oxford University Press.

Richard Sharpe was Professor of Diplomatic in the University of Oxford, Professorial Fellow of Wadham College and Fellow of the British Academy. He taught palaeography, diplomatic, and the scholarly editing of sources from medieval England, as well as books and libraries in the Middle Ages. A student at Cambridge University, he submitted his PhD thesis in the department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic. The history of medieval England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, as well as Irish manuscripts, became since then an interest. Three of his early publications on those subjects are now invaluable tools for medievalists: Medieval Irish Saints’ Lives: An Introduction to Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae (1991), English Benedictine Libraries: The Shorter Catalogues (1996) and A Handlist of the Latin Writers of Great Britain and Ireland before 1540, with Additions and Corrections (2001). Among his latest studies were many key contributions on charters, libraries and catalogues in medieval England, and antiquarian learning. He was general editor of The Charters of William II and Henry I, aimed at collecting, editing, and interpreting the Anglo-Norman royal acts issued from 1087 to 1135, and with Mícheál Hoyne, of Clóliosta, a catalogue of printing in Irish from the beginning until 1871. With Dr James Willoughby, he was director of Medieval Libraries of Great Britain, a searchable digital resource updating and expanding Neil Ker’s monumental work. He was also general editor of the British Academy’s Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues, published by the British Library, whose index of identified authors and works contains over 30,000 entries for provenanced copies. Prof Sharpe delivered the 2019 Lyell Lectures in Bibliography: Libraries and Books in Medieval England.

María José López-Couso is Associate Professor of English and Dean of the Faculty of Philology at the University of Santiago de Compostela, her alma mater. She teaches varieties of English, research methods in English language and linguistics, and Corpus Linguistics at both undergraduate and graduate level, and supervises doctoral students on her main area of research. This is mainly grammaticalisation processes in the history of English, as well as clausal complementation in Old, Middle and Early Modern English, existential constructions, and parentheticals. Among her numerous publications in the field are co-edited volumes like English Historical Syntax and Morphology (2002), Rethinking Grammaticalization: New Perspectives (2008), Information Structure and Syntactic Change in the History of English (2012), or Corpus Linguistics on the Move (2016), which merited the AESLA, AEDEAN, and AELINCO 2017 awards. She has been part of the Executive Board of ICAME and co-edits Research in Corpus Linguistics, the journal of the Spanish Association for Corpus Linguistics. An active member of the Variation, Linguistic Change and Grammaticalization research group, she has led the project Constructionalization and Grammaticalization in English and collaborated in the Corpus of Historical English Law Reports, 1535-1999. At present, Prof López-Couso is co-directing Constructionalization in Contemporary and Earlier English. Her latest book, Crossing Linguistic Boundaries: Systemic, Synchronic and Diachronic Variation in English, also co-edited, is due in 2019.

Anke Bernau, Senior Lecturer in Medieval Literature and Culture at the University of Manchester, began teaching at Cardiff University, where she had received her doctorate with a thesis on performances of purity in medieval texts. She teaches medieval literature and has supervised doctoral dissertations on medieval romance, drama, ghosts and material culture. Her research interests are wide-ranging, embracing late medieval poetics and aesthetics, medievalism, hagiography, mysticism and medieval religious cultures, as well as female virginity (medieval to modern). Key publications include Medieval Virginities (2003) co-edited, Virgins: A Cultural History (2007), translated into German and Japanese, and two co-edited collections of essays: Medieval Film (2009) and Sanctity as Literature in Late Medieval Britain (2014). Her most recent essays focus on affect and form in medieval literature, early modern medievalism, ekphrasis in Pearl, and Lydgate’s poetics. She has held Research and Visiting Fellowships at Freie Universität, Berlin, and Harvard University, serves as a general editor of the Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture Series and, since 2015, as co-editor of the academic journal Exemplaria: Medieval, Early Modern, Theory. Dr Bernau is currently working on Curious Knots: The Arts of Craft in Late Medieval England, a project on late medieval aesthetics, poetics and material culture.