Biography

William Brockbank completed his DPhil in Old English poetry at Jesus College, University of Oxford, in 2022, and was a Swiss National Science Foundation postdoctoral researcher and instructor in the Department of English, University of Bern (2021–2024), and an instructor in Old English at the Englisches Seminar, University of Zürich (2024–2025). His two main areas of research are the philological study of Old English poetry and the transmission of Latinate learning in Old English medical compilations. He teaches Old and Middle English language and literature, and has published on Old English verse and medical texts, as well as on the Old Norse-Icelandic sagas.

Orcid profile: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-2864-4993

Teaching

BA lecture ‘An Introduction to Old and Middle English’, BA seminar ‘Heroes and Villains’.

Publications

‘Herheard or her heord? Locating the Female Speaker in The Wife’s Lament 15b’ [forthcoming; in preparation]

‘Hypermetricality in The Dream of the Rood 133a? The Case for Emendation’ [forthcoming; in submission]

‘Sores, Aches and Warks: Pain in the Old English Medical Corpus’, in Medicine at the Fringes in the Northern World (1000–1500): Manuscripts, Language and Society, ed. by Luthien Cangemi (Berlin: De Gruyter, forthcoming 2025) [accepted]

‘Orðanc enta geweorc: Perceiving the Ruins of the Roman Past in Old English Poetry’, in When Cities Fall: Cultural Reflections of Loss and Lament, ed. by Christoph Pretzer (Berlin: De Gruyter, forthcoming 2025) [accepted]

‘The Use of notae in the Copy of the Old English Herbarium in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 76’, Notes and Queries, 72 (2025), 1–5 <https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjae104>

Review of Nelson Goering, Prosody in Medieval English and Norse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), Medium Ævum, 93 (2024), 441–2

Review of Lori Ann Garner, Hybrid Healing: Old English Remedies and Medical Texts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022), TOEBI Newsletter, 40 (2024), 43–8

‘Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 76 (fols 68r–130v)’ (University of Oxford, 2022) <https://doi.org/10.25446/oxford.21388719.v1>

Review of Donald Scragg, A Conspectus of Scribal Hands Writing English, 700–1100 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2021), TOEBI Newsletter, 39 (2022), 35–7

Review of Rebecca Merkelbach and Gwendolyne Knight, eds, Margins, Monsters, Deviants: Alterities in Old Norse Literature and Culture, The North Atlantic World, 3 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), Saga-Book, 46 (2022), 203–6

‘Washed-up Whales and Wintry Weather in the Sagas of Icelanders’, Medieval Ecocriticisms, 1 (2021), 29–43

Review of Christopher Abram, Evergreen Ash: Ecology and Catastrophe in Old Norse Myth and Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019), Saga-Book, 44 (2020), 228–31