About Jesus College/Our community/ People
Professor Rachel Burns

Roles and subjects

Tutorial Fellow in Medieval English Literature

Contact

rachel.burns@ell.ox.ac.uk

Academic Background

Rachel read English at St. Anne’s College, University of Oxford (2008–2011), and studied on the MSt 650–1550 in the Oxford English Faculty (2013–2014). She completed her PhD at University College London in 2018.

Undergraduate Teaching Areas

Old English Literature, Middle English Literature & Manuscript Studies.

Postgraduate Teaching Areas

Old English Literature.

Research Interests

Old English poetics and metre; material texts; materialism in narrative; patristic and vernacular theologies.

Publications

Monographs

  • A History of Old English Verse Layout: Poetics on the Page, Book Cultures (York: Arc Humanities Press, forthcoming 2024)
  • A Theology of Things in Early Medieval English Literature, Studies in Old English Literature (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming 2025)

Edited Collections

Rachel A. Burns and Rafael J. Pascual, eds. Tradition and Innovation in Old English Metre (York: Arc Humanities Press, 2022).

Articles and Chapters

  • ‘Emotional disturbance in the Old English Dialogues of Solomon and Saturn’, English Studies: Special Edition on Morality, Exemplarity, and Emotion in Old English Literature, ed. Niamh Kehoe (forthcoming 2024).
  • ‘The Wanderer and the Book of Ezekiel’, Neophilologus (2023) [available online pre-print: https://rdcu.be/dANwN]
  • ‘”God send vs þe dew of heuene” in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 172: A New Edition of a Bilingual Lyric, with Commentary’, Studia Neophilologica 95 (2023): 226–40.
  • ‘The Wanderings of Saturn: Psychogeography, Psalms, and Solomon and Saturn’, in Ideas of the World in Early Medieval English Literature, Studies in Old English Literature 1, ed. Mark Atherton, Kazutomo Karasawa and Francis Leneghan (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022), 69–102.
  • ‘Mind the Gap: Inter-word Spacing and Metrical Organisation in Old English verse’, in Tradition and Innovation in Old English Metre, ed. Rachel A. Burns and Rafael J. Pascual (York: Arc Humanities Press, 2022), 207–18.
  • ‘Spirits and Skins: the sceapheord of Exeter Book Riddle 13 and Holy Labour’, Review of English Studies 73 (2022), 429–441.
  • ‘Saturn’s Scythe: A Note on Solomon and Saturn I, Line 109a’, Notes and Queries 67 (2021), 467–468.
  • Solomon and Saturn I, 89a, “prologa prim”: an Exercise in Monastic Reading Practice’, Anglia: Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie 138 (2020), 618–48.

Other Publications

I have regularly contributed to the Old English section of The Year’s Work in English Studies (2020–present), writing or contributing in different years to sections on manuscript studies, riddles, wisdom and shorter poetry, and Beowulf. Between 2020 and 2022 I was co-editor of the Newsletter for the Teachers of Old English in Britain and Ireland.

Links

Subject notes for courses taught at Jesus College:

See Prof Rachel’s departmental profile and the Faculty of English website.