Stuck in trains for hours yesterday, I was revisiting favourite passages from The Lord of the Rings. It’s almost a cliche to say that every re-reading rewards you with new details of Tolkien’s invented world that you hadn’t quite noticed…
During the last few years I have been attending the Tolkien sessions at Kalamazoo semi-regularly (once every two years, on average). The International Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo, hosted by Western Michigan University, has been running for over 50 years, and the…
I had hoped to post more often on this blog, but this term has been unusually busy. There have been a lot of great opportunities and many exciting projects are in the pipeline, but time has flown and here we…
Tolkien scholars and fans alike have been extremely lucky to have witnessed a flurry of recent publications of Tolkien’s works such as The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún (2009), The Fall of Arthur (2013) and Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary,…
It’s been a while since my last update: I am back to lecturing full-time now, and I really hit the ground running this term! Among other modules, I taught Literary Transformations (Year 2), Gothic and Science Fiction (Year 3) and…
It’s been a busy autumn, with my first public lecture after having a baby, new publications in the pipeline and new, exciting academic ventures. On 18-19 October I took part in Literature Wales’ Space, Time, Machine and Monster festival at…
It’s been a while since I have had a chance to update the News section (I am on maternity leave, with all the joys and tribulations that this encompasses!) so some most of the announcements here are a few months/weeks…
In the last few weeks I took part in two brilliant conferences in Ireland and Germany. Tolkien: The Forest and the City was held at the School of English at Trinity College Dublin, on 21st-22nd September 2012. I presented a…
This August I took part in the Tolkien Society’s major event since 2005, The Return of the Ring (16-20 August), a celebration of Tolkien on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the publication of The Hobbit. This was a…
The last few months too many things have happened that I have not managed to report in a timely fashion – I have been getting into the habit of using facebook for daily and weekly updates, so feel free to…
