About

Disinventing Old English is a large-scale collaborative project by which scholars of historical linguistics and Old English language and literature think, feel, and research together in order to reshape the way in which “Old English” is named, conceptualized, and taught in academic settings. The end goal is to create an open access textbook, digital workbook, digital text editions, and companion essays for Old English language teachers and learners. However, as its title indicates, the emphasis of this project is not on these academic products but on the process of “disinventing”: of shedding intellectual, philosophical, and affective modes of knowledge praxis that keep this language “old,” addled, anchored to–and an anchor for–a progress narrative of old-middle-modern English historical linguistics and the colonial, racial, and gender politics that continue to subtend this academic subfield. Disinventing Old English is therefore a learning community, and a process-based project that aims to fill a vital need in the study of  what is now called “Old English.” 

While a mounting body of work has begun to reframe Old English scholarship within global, multiracial, anti-racist, and intersectional knowledge systems,[1] Old English textbooks remain the same. Yet it is via the Old English language classroom that such new frameworks of Old English scholarship are made possible. For how can one become a scholar-teacher of Old English literature without first learning Old English? Consequently, the field must invest in radical changes to its Old English pedagogy, textbooks, and student texts so that these materials not only catch up with but also lead the way in inclusive modalities of Old English scholarship.

Disinventing Old English responds to this need for a radically-restructured pedagogy by asking participants to collaboratively confront and rethink outdated models of Old English language learning in order to create new inclusive and postcolonial materials of language study for twenty-first century students.

citations

[1] See Literature Compass Special Issue “Critical Race and the Middle Ages,” ed. Dorothy Kim, 16.9-10 (2019) especially Coral Lumbley, “The “dark Welsh”: Color, race, and alterity in the matter of medieval Wales”; Nicole Lopez-Jantzen, “Between Empires: Race and Ethnicity in the early Middle Ages”; and Adam Miyashiro, “Our deeper past: Race, settler colonialism, and medieval heritage politics.” In Dating Beowulf: Studies in Intimacy, eds. Daniel C. Remein and Erica Weaver (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019) see Robin Norris, “Sad Men in Beowulf,” 210-26 and Catalin Taranu, “Men into Monsters: Troubling Race, Ethnicity, and Masculinity in Beowulf,” 189-209. See the forthcoming Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Special Issue “Looking Ahead: Global Exchanges in the North Atlantic, ca. 350–1300,” eds. Nahir Otaño Gracia, Nicole Lopez-Jantzen, and Erica Weaver, 51.1 (2021) especially Alison Hudson, “Routes of North African Impact on Book Production in the British Isles before c. 800”; Gillian Gower, “Racing Plainchant: Hadrian and the History of Chant in England”; Gabrielle DaCosta, “Reading the ‘Necropolitical’ in Early Medieval English Poetry”; Joey McMullen, “Literary Landscapes and Cultural Interplay in the Early Medieval North Atlantic”; and Marian E. Polhill, “Ganotes hleoþor: Posthuman Moments in the Medieval Global Atlantic.” See the forthcoming postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, Special Issue: “Race, Revulsion, and Revolution,” eds. Mary Rambaran-Olm, M. Breann Leake, Micah Goodrich, 11.4 (2020) especially Adam Miyashiro, “Homeland Insecurity: Biopolitics and Sovereign Violence in Beowulf”; Sherif Abdelkarim, “This Land is Your Land: Naturalization in England and Arabia, 500˗1000”; Coral Lumbley, “Velut in sentinam congessit’: Refugees and Racism, Modern and Medieval”; Erik Wade, “The Birds and the Bedes: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Bede’s In Cantica Canticorum”; Helen Young, “Race, Medievalism and the Eighteenth-century Gothic Turn”; Marjorie Housley, “Uneasy Presences: Revulsion and Atemporality in Soul & Body Poems”; and Eduardo Ramos, “Confronting Whiteness: Antiracism in Medieval Studies.” See the forthcoming English Language Notes Special Issue: “Indigenous Futures & Medieval Pasts,” eds. Tarren Andrews and Tiffany Beechy 58, no. 2 (2020), especially Tarren Andrews, “Indigenous Futures and Medieval Pasts: An Introduction”; Erin Sweany, “Unsettling comparisons: Ethical Considerations of Comparative Approaches to the Old English Medical Corpus”; and Stephen Yeager “The Global Far North: Planning Indigenization Efforts in Medieval Studies.” See the forthcoming Yearbook of English Studies, Special Issue: Literature to 1200, edited by Joshua Davies and Clare Lees 52 (2022), especially (and provisionally titled) Tarren Andrews, “Research, Renewal, and Radical Compassion: The Wife’s Lament in an Indigenous Feminist Context”; Ananya Jahanara Kabir, “Monsters, Critics, and Borders: Reading Beowulf as a North Sea Poem”; Mary Rambaran-Olm and Erik Wade, “What’s in a Name?: The Past and Present Racism in ‘Anglo-Saxon Studies.’”