I am Professor of English at California State University, Northridge, where I have taught since August 1999. Prior to coming to Northridge, I taught at the University of Missouri, Columbia from 1997-1999. I received my MA at the University of St Andrews in Scotland and my PhD in Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic from the University of Cambridge in England. I work on medieval language and literature from the Anglo-Saxon period to the fourteenth century with a special emphasis on Old English and early Middle English. My early work was on the history of the English language during the Old English period, especially the development of phonology and its dialects. More recently I have worked on regional and cultural diversity in historiographical and romance literature.
I have strong interests in using technology for both research and teaching and am working to understand how the growing field of Digital Humanities can expand our knowledge of an access to the cultures of the Middle Ages. I currently serve as co-PI on the Archive of Early Middle English project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
In 2010 I established the CSUN Center for the Digital Humanities, of which I am currently director. My Digital Humanities work also includes the NEH-Funded Lexomics Project, which produces and uses computational tools for text analysis. Most recently, I worked as a designer/developer for the online search tool Serendip-o-matic as part of the One Week | One Tool project.
At Cal State Northridge I teach courses on Old and Middle English literature, Chaucer, History of the English Language, and the Digital Humanities. I have also taught a variety of early British survey courses, writing about literature, Tolkien and medievalism, English grammar, and interdisciplinary courses on Scottish Culture and the Early Modern World.
Outside of Cal State Northridge, I am an Associate Faculty member of the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and web designer for the Medieval Association of the Pacific (for which I have also served as Secretary).
For my publications and current projects, please see my research section.