Weaver, Erica
Kaplan 178B
Tel: 310.825.4173 / Fax: 310.267.4339 / Email
Education
- B.A., Columbia University, 2012
- Ph.D., Harvard University, 2018
Interests and Current Projects
As a specialist in Old English and Anglo-Latin, I primarily work on the earliest English literature, though my interests extend to poetry and poetic theory from all periods and to broader questions about the history of hermeneutics. Throughout my research and teaching, I ask what it meant to read and write a thousand years ago, when English was only just emerging as a written medium. I am also invested in theories of cognition and concentration, enigmatic literature, schoolroom texts, Benedictine monasticism, and literary form. Uniting these interests, my first book, The Hermeneutics of Distraction in Early Medieval England (Oxford UP, 2025), argues that distraction and the threats it posed were central in the development of early medieval literature and literary theory, particularly during the 10th-c. monastic “correction” movement traditionally known as the English Benedictine Reform. An article drawn from this project–on difficult style and the history of reading–appeared in New Literary History, and a second piece–on staging (in)attention–is out in Representations. I am also co-editor, with Daniel C. Remein, of Dating Beowulf: Studies in Intimacy, which playfully redeploys “dating”—a verb that usually heralds some of the most divisive critical impasses in early medieval studies—to provocatively phrase a set of new relationships with an Old English poem, and, with A. Joseph McMullen, of The Legacy of Boethius in Medieval England: The Consolation and its Afterlives, which offers the first holistic survey of the reworkings of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy in medieval England. For my updated CV and full publications list, please visit my website.
Monograph
The Hermeneutics of Distraction in Early Medieval England (Oxford UP, 2025)
Edited Volumes
Ed., with Daniel C. Remein, Dating Beowulf: Studies in Intimacy (Manchester UP, 2020).
Ed., with A. Joseph McMullen, The Legacy of Boethius in Medieval England: The Consolation and its Afterlives (ACMRS, 2018).
Journal Special Issues
Global Encounters in the North Atlantic, ca. 350–1300, Essay cluster in Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies 51.1 (2021): 1–201. Editor, with Nahir Otaño Gracia and Nicole Lopez-Jantzen.
The Legacy of Boethius on the Continent, A special issue of Carmina Philosophiae: Journal of the International Boethius Society 23 (2014). Guest Editor, with A. Joseph McMullen.
Articles & Chapters
“Bending Minds in the Old English Boethius, in The Age of Alfred: Rethinking English Literary Culture c. 850–950, ed. Amy Faulkner and Francis Leneghan (Brepols, 2024), 341–61.
“‘Stuffed with Divine Words’: Undigested Texts in Early Medieval England,” in Forms and Power in Medieval and Early Modern Literature: A Book for James Simpson, ed. Daniel Donoghue, Sebastian Sobecki, and Nicholas Watson (D.S. Brewer, 2024), 35–48.
“A Canterbury School of Literary Theory: Aldhelm’s De virginitate, the Liber monstrorum, and (Un)Reliable Fictions,” in The Practice and Politics of Reading, 650-1500, ed. Daniel Donoghue, James Simpson, Nicholas Watson, and Anna Wilson (D.S. Brewer, 2022), 63–83.
With Daniel C. Remein, “Dons and Dragons: Beowulf and ‘Popular Reading,’” in Bestsellers and Masterpieces: The Changing Medieval Canon, ed. Heather Blurton and Dwight Reynolds (Manchester University Press, 2022), 49–78.
With Nahir Otaño Gracia and Nicole Lopez-Jantzen, “Global Encounters in the North Atlantic, ca. 350–1300: Directions, Movements, Questions,” Viator 51.1 (2021): 1–8.
“Performing (In)Attention: Ælfric, Ælfric Bata, and the Visitatio Sepulchri,” Representations 152 (2020): 1–24.
“Confessing in Old English: The Life of Saint Mary of Egypt and the Problem with Penance,”* in “Critical Confessions Now,” ed. Abdulhamit Arvas, Afrodesia McCannon, and Kris Trujillo, postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 11.2 (2020): 282–90.
*Scheduled to be reprinted in Critical Confessions Now (Palgrave, 2022)
“Living with Books in Early Medieval England: Solomon and Saturn, Bibliophilia, and the Globalist Red Book of Darley,” in Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age, ed. Benjamin Albritton, Georgia Henley, and Elaine Treharne (Routledge, 2020), 173–89.
With Daniel C. Remein, “Getting Intimate,” in Dating Beowulf: Studies in Intimacy, ed. Remein and Weaver (Manchester University Press, 2020), 1–28.
“Premodern and Postcritical: Medieval Enigmata and the Hermeneutic Style,” New Literary History 50.1 (2019): 43–64.
“Chaucer, Williams, and the ‘American Idiom,’” Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 45 (2018): 105–28.
“Finding Consolation at the End of the Millennium,” in The Legacy of Boethius in Medieval England: The Consolation and its Afterlives, ed. McMullen and Weaver (ACMRS, 2018), 89–102.
“Reading Boethius in Medieval England: The Consolation of Philosophy from Alfred to Ashby,” with A. Joseph McMullen, in The Legacy of Boethius in Medieval England, vii–xxx.
“Hybrid Forms: Translating Boethius in Anglo-Saxon England,”* Anglo-Saxon England 45 (2016): 213–38.
*Awarded the 2018 Paul E. Szarmach Prize for an outstanding first article on the literature or culture of early medieval England.
Interest Areas
• Sexuality & Gender Studies
• Medieval Studies
• History of the English Language
• Critical Theory
