Network Members

Principal Investigator

Gareth Lloyd Evans is Rebecca Marsland Career Development Fellow in English at St Hilda's College, Oxford. He is author of Men and Masculinities in the Sagas of Icelanders (Oxford University Press, 2019) and co-editor of Masculinities in Old Norse Literature (D. S. Brewer, 2020). His current research focuses on the representation of emotion in Old Norse literature, and this is the focus of his current monograph project. From September 2024, he will be Official Fellow and Tutor in English at St John's College, Oxford, and Associate Professor of Old Norse at the University of Oxford.

Co-Investigator

Brynja Þorgeirsdóttir is an Assistant Professor of Icelandic Literature at the University of Iceland’s Faculty of Icelandic and Comparative Cultural Studies. Her work focuses on the literary depiction of emotions in the poetry and prose of Old Norse literature, the performance of emotions and the body. Additionally, her research extends to Old Norse medical literature and medieval conceptions of the body and emotions. She holds a PhD from Cambridge University, where she also served as a post-doctoral research associate in the project ‘The Íslendingasögur as Prosimetrum.’

Network Members

Ásdís Egilsdóttir is Professor Emerita in the Department of Icelandic and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Iceland, where she taught Old Norse/Medieval Icelandic Literature until her retirement in 2016. She has published extensively on Bishops’sagas, Icelandic hagiography and miracles. Her research also includes translations, memory studies and gender, especially masculinity.  She has recently focused on emotion in hagiographic literature and miracles. Among her publications is an edition of Hungrvaka, Þorláks saga byskups and Páls saga byskups for the Íslenzk fornrit series (Reykjavík, 2002).

Hannah Burrows is Senior Lecturer and Director of the Centre for Scandinavian Studies at the University of Aberdeen. Her research interests include legal-literary intersections in medieval Iceland, and cognitive and ecocritical approaches to skaldic poetry. She is currently working on emotion in medieval Nordic law and legal culture.

Stefka G. Eriksen is an Associate Professor of Old Norse philology/Medieval Studies at the University of Oslo. Her research and publications focus on Old Norse literary and manuscript culture, including Old Norse translations, on cognition and the mind in Old Norse culture, and on eco-critical approaches to Old Norse studies. She is the author of Oversatt litteratur i middelalderens Norge (2024), Writing and Reading in Medieval Manuscript Culture (2014) and the main editor of anthologies such as Approaches to the Medieval Self (2020), Intellectual Culture in Medieval Scandinavia (2016), among others. She is the PI of the research initiative Eco-Emotions: Affective Response to Environmental Change in and through Literature (UiO), and Deputy Director of Center for Literature, Cognition and Emotions (UiO).

Siân Grønlie is Kate Elmore Fellow in English at St Anne's College, Oxford, and Associate Professor of Medieval English at the University of Oxford. She is author of The Saint and the Saga Hero: Hagiography and Early Icelandic Literature (2017) and The Old Testament in Medieval Icelandic Texts: Translation, Exegesis and Storytelling (2024.

Kári Gíslason is a writer and academic who is professor of creative writing and literary studies at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane. He is the author of The Promise of Iceland (UQP, 2011), a family memoir about his birthplace, and the novels The Ash Burner (UQP, 2015) and The Sorrow Stone (UQP, 2022). He is also the co-author, with Richard Fidler, of Saga Land (HarperCollins, 2017), and has written works of travel journalism, essays, reviews and radio scripts. His most recent scholarly publications have concerned the role of practice-led research methods in Old Norse-Icelandic Studies. His fifth book, Running with Pirates, is a memoir of fatherhood set on Corfu that will be published in August 2024.

Carolyne Larrington is Emerita Professor of medieval European literature at the University of Oxford and an Emerita Research Fellow of St John's College, Oxford. She has recently published Approaches to Emotion in Middle English Literature with MUP, and is a co-editor of the collected volume Saga Emotions, also with MUP.

George Manning is College Lecturer in English at Pembroke College, Oxford.  He teaches Old Norse, Old English, Middle English, and the history of the English language. His doctoral thesis examined the presentation of anger in the Old Norse-Icelandic Íslendingasögur (Sagas of Icelanders). His research interests include Old Norse-Icelandic literature and culture; the Íslendingasögur; emotion theory; sexuality and gender studies; and Old Norse mythic tradition.

Teodoro Manrique-Antón teaches German language and literature at the Department of Modern Philology, Universidad de Castilla La Mancha, Spain. His main research interests are in Old Norse Literature: emotions in the sagas, the reception of Old Norse Literature in Spanish language and Christian adaptation of Old Norse myths. 

Rebecca Merkelbach is assistant professor of Old Norse-Icelandic  studies at the University of Tübingen. She has published on  monstrosity and the paranormal in Old Norse literature, on the  ‘post-classical’ Sagas of Icelanders, and on storyworlds and  worldbuilding. Her research interests include the development of saga literature, medieval ideas of creativity, storytelling and worldbuilding, and the role played by emotion in both of these contexts.

Kristen Mills is Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Oslo. She researches the history of emotions (focusing on grief and mourning), the cultural history of death and dying, and constructions of gender in the literatures of medieval Ireland, Britain, and Iceland.

Katherine Marie Olley is the Assistant Professor in Viking Studies and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Viking Age at the University of Nottingham. She is also a research affiliate on the ERC-funded BODY-POLITICS project led by Dr Marianne Hem Eriksen. Her research focuses primarily on kinship, childbirth, the body and emotion in Old Norse literature and her monograph Kinship in Old Norse Myth and Legend was published by Boydell and Brewer in 2022.

Edel Porter is a lecturer in Historical Linguistics and Old English Language and Literature at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain. Her research interests include skaldic poetry, history of emotions, and the post-medieval reception of Old Norse Literature.

Sif Rikhardsdottir is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Iceland and Executive Director of The New Chaucer Society. She has edited several volumes, including most recently The Routledge Companion to Medieval English Literature with Raluca Radulescu (2023), Medieval Literary Voices: Embodiment, Materiality, Performance with Louise D’Arcens (2022) and Charlemagne in the Norse and Celtic Worlds with Helen Fulton (2022). She has written extensively on emotion theory and works across Old Norse, Middle English, Middle High German, Old French, Anglo-Norman, and Italian. She is the author of two monographs, Emotion in Old Norse Literature (2017) and Medieval Translations and Cultural Discourse (2012, paperback 2018).

Alexander Wilson is Research Associate in Old Norse Language and Literature at the University of Leicester, where he is part of the Body-Politics project (ERC). He completed his PhD in Old Norse studies at Durham University in 2018, and has since held teaching and research posts at the Universities of Stuttgart and Tübingen. His work centres on the political aspects of Icelandic texts and their intersection with practices of violence, legality, exile, and community. He has also published on saga narratology, skaldic verse, and the construction of desire and sexuality in medieval texts.