Dr Amy Faulkner

Email: amy.faulkner@ucl.ac.uk

Education and Experience 

Amy received her BA in English Language and Literature from Christ Church College, Oxford (2013). She went on to do an MA at the University of Nottingham (2014-15), and returned to Oxford for her DPhil in English (awarded 2019). This doctoral research was funded by the AHRC.

Amy has taught Old and Middle English literature in a number of different institutions, including St Peter's College, Oxford, Magdalen College, Oxford, the University of Cambridge and Royal Holloway, University of London. She has been teaching at UCL since 2019.

Research Interests

Amy’s research interests include the representation of wealth, material things, the mind and mental processes in Old English literature, with particular focus on the group of Old English prose translations traditionally associated with Alfred the Great: the Old English Pastoral Care, Boethius, Soliloquies and Prose Psalms. Her first monograph, Wealth and the Material World in the Old English Alfredian Corpus, was published by Boydell & Brewer in January 2023. This study reads wealth and other material things in the Alfredian translations from a materialist perspective, situating the prose translations in the wider context of Old English poetry, and investigating the relationship between worldly wealth and immaterial riches. Her current research examines the mind in Old English poetry and prose, with special focus on material models of the mind, and continues to explore the role of wealth and treasure in the literature of this period. Moreover, she has been continuing her work on Alfredian literature, co-editing a forthcoming volume which aims to reassess the limits of the traditional "Alfredian corpus", and co-organising 'Alfredian Voices', a recurring session at Leeds International Medieval Congress.

Publications

‘Crafted Things in the Old English Phoenix’, Anglia 141 (2023), 234–257.

The Age of Alfred: Rethinking English Literary Culture c. 850–950, ed. Amy Faulkner and Francis Leneghan (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming).  

Wealth and the Material World in the Old English Alfredian Corpus, Anglo-Saxon Studies 46 (Cambridge: Brewer, 2023).

‘Seeking within the Self in The Metres of Boethius’ Anglo-Saxon England 48 (2022 [for 2019]), 43–62. 

‘Treasure and the Life Course in Genesis A and Beowulf’, in Early Medieval English Life Courses: Cultural-Historical Perspectives, ed. Thijs Porck and Harriet Soper (Leiden: Brill, 2022), pp. 229-50.

'Death and Treasure in Exodus and Beowulf’, English Studies 101 (2020), 785-801.

‘The Mind in the Old English Prose Psalms’, The Review of English Studies 70 (2019), 597-617.

‘Royal Authority in the Biblical Quotations of the Old English Pastoral Care’, Neophilologus 102 (2018), 125-40.