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SEIS Academic Forum Series (No.714)
The Story of Beowulf Studies
Speaker: Professor Leonard Neidorf
Time: 15:30-17:30
Date: May 20, 2019 (Monday)
Venue: Lecture room, 3rd Floor, University Library
Abstract:
In this lecture, Professor Leonard Neidorf presents an overview of his research on Beowulf, the most widely studied work of English literature from the early medieval period. Beowulf is now regarded as the first great work of English literature, but it was unknown to the modern world until 1815. Professor Neidorf explains how he and other scholars combine methods from disciplines such as philology, comparative literature, and digital humanities to shed new light on this marvelous and mysterious poem.
About the speaker:
Professor Leonard Neidorf teaches medieval literature and the history of the English language in Nanjing University. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. Before coming to China, Neidorf was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. He is the author of The Transmission of Beowulf: Language, Culture, and Scribal Behavior (Cornell University Press, 2017) and the editor of The Dating of Beowulf: A Reassessment (Boydell & Brewer, 2014). In April 2019, he co-authored “Large-Scale Quantitative Profiling of the Old English Verse Tradition’ with scholars from Harvard, MIT, and University of Texas. Their paper was published in the prestigious science journal, Nature: Human Behaviour. This significant application of highly advanced computational methodology in Old English literary studies has received wide acclaim, as reported by Harvard University, The Guardian and The Times.
