I have taught in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia since 2005, after studying and teaching in the United Kingdom. My own research has been primarily concerned with medieval romance (both Arthurian and non-Arthurian), writing on issues of historiography (in particular post-conquest perceptions of the Anglo-Saxon Past), English national identity, saracens and other medieval others, the law, the medieval erotic, the medieval geographical imagination, TV medievalism (including A Game of Thrones), digital medievalism (video games), and ecocritical approaches to premodern texts. I have published three books, co-edited a major encyclopedia project, and written more than 30 articles on medieval literature and culture, details of which can be found on my publication and research pages. I am currently completing a monograph on the Medieval Geographical Imagination.

Over the years I have spent time as a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge, a Visiting Fellow in the Culture and Politics of the Transregional at The Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at Cambridge, and as Slater Visiting Fellow at University College, University of Durham.

Research Networks:

Oecologies

Oecologies: Inhabiting Premodern Worlds is a research cluster that gathers scholars from the humanities living and working along the North American Pacific coast to investigate the idea of “oecology,” an older spelling of the modern concept “ecology”; we retain this defamiliarizing spelling because our research asks how we might rethink “ecology” through the study of premodern natural history, taxonomy, hierarchy, and categorization.

Selected Publications

• The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain(eds. With Siân Echard) (London: Blackwell, 2017), 4 volumes.
• Sexual Cultures in Late Medieval Britain, Amanda Hopkins, Robert Allen Rouse, and Cory J. Rushton (eds.) (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014).
• The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance. Studies in Medieval Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005).
• The Medieval Quest for Arthur(with Cory J. Rushton) (Stroud: Tempus, 2005).
• ‘Dangerous Nostalgias: Fantasies of Medievalism, Race, and Identity’, in Alan K. Kelly (ed.), Power and Subversion in A Game of Thrones (New York: McFarland, 2022), 30-47.
• With Cory. J. Rushton, ‘Broken Bodies, Broken Kingdoms, Broken Promises: Revolutionary Failure in A Game of Thrones’, in Anna Czarnowus and Carolyne Larrington (eds.), Memory and Medievalism in George R.R. Martin and the Game of Thrones (Bloomsbury, 2022), 24-35.
• ‘From Shields to Sheeldes: Producing Mercantile Space in Late-Medieval Romance’, in Pratiques et Conceptions de l’espace au Moyen Âge, Special Edition of Etudes Médiévales Anglaises94 (Winter 2019): 149-70.
• ‘Romance and History’, in Jennifer Jahner, Emily Steiner, and Elizabeth Tyler (eds.), The Cambridge History of Historical Writing: Britain and Ireland, 500-1500(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, November 2019), 398-403.
• ‘Indigenizing the Medieval, or how did Māori and Awabakal become inscribed in Medieval Manuscripts?’, forthcomingin Parergon2 (November, 2015): 233-50.
• ‘Reading (in) Medieval London: Emplaced Reading, or Towards a Spatial Hermeneutic for Medieval Romance’, in Nick Perkins (ed.), The Materiality of Medieval Romance(Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), 41-57.
• ‘What Lies Between? Thinking Through Medieval Spatiality’, Robert T. Tally Jr. (ed.), Literary Cartographies: Spatiality, Representation, and Narrative(New York: Palgrave, 2014), 13-30.
• ‘Reading Ruins: Arthurian Caerleon and the Untimely Architecture of History’, Arthuriana(April, 2013): 101-12. (Winner of the 2013 James Randall Leader Prize for an ‘outstanding Arthurian Article’, awarded by the International Arthurian society, North American Branch)
• ‘Arthurian Britain’ (with Cory J. Rushton), in Ad Putter and Elizabeth Archibald (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Tradition(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 218-34.
• The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain (eds. With Siân Echard) (London: Blackwell, 2017), 4 volumes.
• Sexual Cultures in Late Medieval Britain, Amanda Hopkins, Robert Allen Rouse, and Cory J. Rushton (eds.) (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014).
• The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance. Studies in Medieval Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005).
• The Medieval Quest for Arthur (with Cory J. Rushton) (Stroud: Tempus, 2005).
• ‘From Shields to Sheeldes: Producing Mercantile Space in Late-Medieval Romance’, in Pratiques et Conceptions de l’espace au Moyen Âge, Special Edition of Etudes Médiévales Anglaises 94 (Winter 2019): 149-70.
• ‘Romance and History’, in Jennifer Jahner, Emily Steiner, and Elizabeth Tyler (eds.), The Cambridge History of Historical Writing: Britain and Ireland, 500-1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, November 2019), 398-403.
• ‘Indigenizing the Medieval, or how did Māori and Awabakal become inscribed in Medieval Manuscripts?’, forthcoming in Parergon2 (November, 2015): xx-xx.
• ‘Reading (in) Medieval London: Emplaced Reading, or Towards a Spatial Hermeneutic for Medieval Romance’, in Nick Perkins (ed.), The Materiality of Medieval Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), 41-57.
• ‘What Lies Between? Thinking Through Medieval Spatiality’, Robert T. Tally Jr. (ed.), Literary Cartographies: Spatiality, Representation, and Narrative (New York: Palgrave, 2014), 13-30.
• ‘Reading Ruins: Arthurian Caerleon and the Untimely Architecture of History’, Arthuriana1 (April, 2013): 101-12. (Winner of the 2013 James Randall Leader Prize for an ‘outstanding Arthurian Article’, awarded by the International Arthurian society, North American Branch)
• ‘Arthurian Britain’ (with Cory J. Rushton), in Ad Putter and Elizabeth Archibald (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 218-34.

I primarily teach Old and Middle English at both the undergraduate and graduate level, and have taught recent seminars on Romance and Identity, Medieval Wonder, Medieval Ecocriticism, Crusade Literature, Spatial Theory, and the Erotic Middle Ages. I also teach on twentieth-century and contemporary Medievalism and Fantasy literature, most recently a series of seminars on The Song of Ice and Fire as grimdark Medievalism.

I am happy to supervise Honours dissertations and graduate students on any aspect of medieval literature (Od English, Middle English, Old Norse), medieval romance, premodern spatialities, Arthurian literature, ecocriticism, medievalism (from Tolkien to GRR Martin), or contemporary speculative literature.