Dr Harriet (Hattie) Soper

I am mainly a specialist in Old English poetry, though my interests are wide-ranging and include also Old Norse and Middle English poetry and prose. My work is inflected by literary and cultural theory of various stripes, especially ecological and new materialist—that is, theory which questions our conceptions of the environment and the nonhuman.

Before coming to Bristol in early 2024, I was a Stipendiary Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge (2017–2019), and Simon and June Li Fellow in English Literature at Lincoln College, University of Oxford (2019–2023). I have also held visiting positions at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Seville, and Yale University.

I am particularly interested in the ways that humans are drawn into intimacy with their environments in their experience of time. My first monograph, The Life Course in Old English Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2024) explores depictions of human ageing in Old English verse. It emphasises life courses as fluid, variable, and contingent, while stressing how human lives interweave with those of objects, animals, and communities. I also co-edited Early Medieval English Life Courses: Cultural-Historical Perspectives (Brill, 2022) with Thijs Porck (Leiden University). Like my monograph, this volume foregrounds entanglements between human and nonhuman lives, but from a more interdisciplinary perspective.

I am currently working on two new monographs; the first a study of diurnal structures in Old and early Middle English literature, and the second tracing patterns of repetition within and across Old English and Old Norse verse. 

I have previously published on Old Norse eddic dialogues in Scandinavian Studies and Old Norse Poetry in Performance, ed. Brian McMahon and Annemari Ferreira (Routledge, 2022). Within the world of Middle English, I have published in The Library on the subject of the manuscript contexts of the late fifteenth-century ‘Winchester Anthology’,  and on age identities in Old and Middle English poetry for the Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Aging.

My work also appears in The Review of English Studies, English Studies, Neophilologus, Notes and Queries, and elsewhere.