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As a specialist in Old English and Anglo-Latin, I primarily work on the earliest English literature, though my interests extend to poetry and poetic theory from all periods and to broader questions about the history of hermeneutics. In my research and teaching, I ask what it meant to read and write a thousand years ago, when English was only just emerging as a written medium. I am also invested in theories of cognition and concentration, enigmatic literature, schoolroom texts, medieval drama and performance studies, Benedictine monasticism, asceticism, literary form, and affect studies. Uniting these interests, my current book project, Reading Against Distraction in Early Medieval England, argues that distraction and the threats it posed were central in the development of early medieval literature and literary theory. As I demonstrate, distraction was conceived of as a gateway to Hell, but it was also, paradoxically, a gateway to invested reading and interpretation (and thus to attention). An article drawn from this project is forthcoming in New Literary History.
Previously, my writing has appeared in Anglo-Saxon England, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching, and Carmina Philosophiae: Journal of the International Boethius Society, and my article on the Old English Boethius was recently awarded the Paul E. Szarmach Prize for an outstanding first article in the field of Anglo-Saxon studies. I am Co-Editor, with A. Joseph McMullen, of The Legacy of Boethius in Medieval England: The Consolation and its Afterlives (just out from ACMRS) and, with Daniel C. Remain, of Dating Beowulf: Studies in Intimacy (under contract with Manchester University Press). Originally from Virginia, I studied English and Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Columbia University, summa cum laude, before completing my PhD in English at Harvard. I am now Assistant Professor of English at UCLA. In my free time, I love to cook, hike, and eat in and around Los Angeles. I am also a poet, with recent work in Colorado Review and Denver Quarterly. |
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CONTACT
Please feel free to get in touch at ericaweaver@humnet.ucla.edu or follow me on Twitter @ericamweaver.