UBC’s Department of English Language & Literatures (EL&L) is pleased to welcome Dr. Bard Swallow as a new Postdoctoral Fellow. Dr. Swallow recently received the 2026 Leonard Boyle Dissertation Prize for Medieval Studies for their dissertation titled Formal Functions of Latin Poetry in Fourteenth-Century England, which the prize committee described as “original, methodologically sophisticated, and intellectually ambitious.”
In this Q&A, learn more about Dr. Swallow’s award-winning research and what they’re looking forward to during their time at UBC.
“Because I work on multiple languages and material contexts, I get to make connections between scholarly conversations that don’t always intersect. Bringing those pieces together helps show a text in a different light.”
What project are you working on during your Postdoctoral Fellowship, and what do you hope to accomplish?
My project is called With Quaint Words: Multilingual Wordplay in John Gower’s Latin Works. John Gower was a fourteenth-century poet who wrote extensively in English, French, and Latin. Scholars often study those languages separately, which can make a multilingual author like Gower surprisingly difficult to see as a whole. In this project, I’m looking at patterns of wordplay, sound, and other poetic techniques that cross linguistic boundaries. For instance, when Gower is writing in Latin, he sometimes makes puns that only make sense if the reader or listener also knows English or French. What I’m trying to do is develop an approach to Gower’s poetry that is as multilingual as his original audience would have been. While I was reading his poems for my dissertation, I noticed some really interesting examples of multilingual wordplay, but they weren’t relevant to my research at the time, so I had to set them aside for later. Now I get to follow up on the puns I noticed, look for more of them, and try to get a sense of the bigger pattern!
As I get started on the initial reading for the new project, I’m also in conversation with the editors of a book series, working on some revisions to the monograph that began as my dissertation. More generally, I want to make connections in the department and beyond because I’ve learned a lot from conversations with other scholars, and I’m excited to become part of new scholarly communities at UBC.
I’ll be working with Professor Siân Echard, who has done substantial research on Gower’s Latin poetry and translated the Latin verse that is part of his best-known English poem, the Confessio Amantis. This project is funded by a Canada Postdoctoral Research Award administered by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).
Can you tell us about your own research?
John Gower in a portrait from a book with his Vox Clamantis and Chronica Tripertita in Glasgow Univ. Lib., MS Hunter 59 (T.2.17) folio 6v.
“I'm interested in how people make things within systems. What I find exciting is that the limits of those systems often become sources of creativity, so I'm always looking at how writers respond to the possibilities and constraints around them.”
At a very broad level, I’m interested in how people make things within systems. In my research, those systems might be languages, poetic forms, manuscripts, or other media. What I find exciting is that the limits of those systems often become sources of creativity, so I’m always looking at how writers respond to the possibilities and constraints around them. My current work on multilingual poetry is one example of that broader interest, because I’m looking at how Gower used multiple languages as part of his creative toolkit.
One thing I enjoy is that my research often sits between different areas of study. Sometimes I’m looking at poetry that’s preserved as the main text in a manuscript, but other times a poem only survives because someone wrote it on the back of a legal document or carved it into a stone tomb. Because I work on multiple languages and material contexts, I get to make connections between scholarly conversations that don’t always intersect. It’s exciting when bringing those pieces together helps show a text in a different light.
Can you tell us about your educational background?
I graduated with my PhD in Medieval Studies from the University of Toronto this past June. Before that, I did an MA in Medieval Literatures and Languages at the University of York in the UK. What comes as a surprise to most people, though, is that my undergraduate degree was in Computer Science. I was always interested in literature, but even at that point I was more interested in moving between languages than staying within a single literary tradition. In hindsight, that probably helps explain why I’ve ended up studying multilingual poetry.
What do you enjoy doing on your free time?
I’m a singer and play a couple of different instruments, mostly guitar. I’m looking forward to making connections with different music communities in Vancouver, including the folk song society, and maybe a choir as well. I also like picking up different crafts—my most recent crafting challenge has been chainmail bracelets, but I may try blackwork embroidery next!
