I am an Assistant Professor of English at Saint Anselm College, an ACLS Fellow 2021-22, and a Senior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography. I hold a Ph.D. from Harvard University in Celtic Languages and Literatures with a concentration in Medieval Studies. I was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University from 2017-2018.
My research concerns cultural transmission and multilingual literatures in medieval Britain, synthesizing book-historical and digital humanities methods to uncover the literary networks that connected Wales, England, and their neighbors. I am dedicated to raising the profile of the Welsh language and literatures within the humanities and I bring a multilingual, transnational perspective to the study and teaching of medieval British literature.
My current book project, Reimagining the Past in the Medieval Anglo-Welsh Borderlands, under contract with Oxford University Press, argues that Anglo-Welsh families in the Marches leveraged their ancestral and political ties to Wales in order to strengthen political power, both regionally and nationally, through the production of historical and genealogical texts that reimagined historical memory in native Wales. In doing so, they reshaped the lines of transmission of Welsh texts into England and amplified Welsh influence on English understandings of the British past.
I am also working on a digital project, “Networks of Book Transmission in Medieval Britain,” which examines large-scale networks of exchange between Benedictine, Cistercian and Augustinian monastic libraries in Wales, England, and the Marches.
Other recent projects include the co-founding of IONA: Islands of the North Atlantic, which seeks radical new methods and materials for the study of the medieval North Atlantic, and the Welsh Chronicles Research Group, dedicated to generating fresh interest in and new editions of medieval Welsh chronicles.
Georgia Henley 