This Project might be for you if…

Disinventing Old English is first and foremost a learning community; therefore it requires a different approach to our work of scholarship and teaching. Although the project is open to anyone in the field (broadly construed), we believe there are certain guiding principles that create a set of “ideal” attributes for participants.  Nota bene – this is not a rigid or exhaustive list; rather, if you recognize anything that matters to you in this list, and more importantly you want to join this project, we would love to have you. 

Disinventing Old English might be right for you if you are: 

1. Commited to an open and inclusive Old English pedagogy that is anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-transphobic, anti-ableist, and anti-hierarchical.
2. Committed to a collaborative model of scholarship, in which collaborations might range from early interventions in papers at conferences and webinars to co-writing and co-editing materials. Essentially, open to working as a team rather than as an individual. 
3. Committed to learning new approaches to the texts we work with on a daily basis, with the intention of seeing them differently. 
4. Committed to confronting your own biases, uncertainties, and errors that have accumulated over years or a lifetime of studying Old English.
5. Committed to teaching Old English language and literature (regardless of its availability as a course at your institution).
6. Committed to building materials that will serve as benchmarks in our field, with all the careful work that will require.  

What role do Donna Beth Ellard and Mary Kate Hurley play in Disinventing Old English?

Disinventing Old English is a project that we (DB and MK) have been thinking about and strategizing for almost two years. Although the idea of disinventing Old English is something we are both deeply committed to, the potential scope of the project quickly outstripped the possibility of it being a two-person collaboration, or even a project for a small handful of contributors. That is why we decided to open it up to the field at large.

We are also emphatically not the owners of this project.  Rather, we see ourselves as facilitators: we want to make a space where interested scholars can build the materials we desperately need to recreate this field. We hope to apply for grants and financial support in the future that will allow us to provide some modest honoraria for scholars who take on leadership roles in webinars and the like.  

We created this website because we want the process of Disinventing Old English to be as transparent as possible. It is imperative that a space meant for building a new approach to Old English not reinscribe old modalities of the field, and so we hope that by making our aims, our methods, our goals, and our operations clear from the outset, we can start that process.