John Niles (scholar)

This article is about the scholar of Old English. For other uses, see John Niles.

John D. Niles is an American scholar of Old English literature best known for his work on Beowulf and the theory of oral literature. A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his higher degrees (B.A. in English, 1967; PhD in Comparative Literature, 1972), he taught for an initial four years as Assistant Professor of English at Brandeis University, then joined the faculty of the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley, where he remained for twenty-six years. In 2001 he joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he taught for ten years in the Department of English, was named the Frederic G. Cassidy Professor of Humanities, and was a Senior Fellow at the UW Institute for the Humanities. After his retirement in 2011 he has remained active in research as Professor Emeritus at both UC Berkeley and UW-Madison.

Niles is the author of eight books on Old English literature and related topics in addition to upwards of sixty scholarly articles and two chapbooks. He has edited or co-edited another eight books, including A Beowulf Handbook (with Robert E. Bjork, 1997) and Klaeber's Beowulf, 4th edn (with R.D. Fulk and Robert E. Bjork, 2008). During the 1980s he conducted extensive fieldwork into singing and storytelling traditions in Scotland, particularly among Scotland's traveling people, and this resulted in his 1997 book Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature. In 2005 he taught a seminar at the Newberry Library, Chicago on the early history of Old English studies, and this became the kernel of his 2015 book The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066-1901. His researches into the archaeology and prehistory of early Northwest Europe led to the joint publication Beowulf and Leyre (2007), which features a mine of information about the prehistoric Danish site (at the present-day hamlet of Lejre) where much of the imagined action of Beowulf is set.

Selected publications

Monographs

• Beowulf: The Poem and Its Tradition (Harvard University Press, 1983)
• Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press,1999)
• Old English Enigmatic Poems and the Play of the Texts (Brepols, 2006)
• Old English Heroic Poems and the Social Life of Texts (Brepols, 2007)
• Beowulf and Leyre (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2007) - with Tom Christensen and Marijane Osborn
• The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066-1901: Remembering, Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015)

Edited collections

• Old English Literature in Context: Ten Essays (Boydell and Brewer, 1980)
• A Beowulf Handbook (University of Nebraska Press, 1997) - with Robert E. Bjork
• Beowulf: An Illustrated Edition, featuring Seamus Heaney's translation of the poem (W.W. Norton, 2007)
• Klaeber’s Beowulf, 4th edition (University of Toronto Press, 2008) - with R.D. Fulk and Robert E. Bjork
• Anglo-Saxon England and the Visual Imagination (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, forthcoming 2015) - with Stacey Klein and Jonathan Wilcox

External links

• Faculty page at University of Wisconsin–Madison