Anya Adair researches medieval English literature, as well as pre-modern English law and legal culture. Her focus is the Old English period, but her research extends also to Old Norse and Anglo-Latin, medieval language interaction, book history and manuscript studies, poetry and poetics, digital humanities, and the history of the English language.
Anya holds a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Laws from the University of Melbourne and graduate degrees in English from Melbourne, Oxford and Yale. At Melbourne and Yale, she has taught creative writing, medieval and early modern English literature, the history of the English language, palaeography and codicology, and digital humanities.
The historical scope of Anya’s present research covers the seventh to the sixteenth centuries. It aims to unite more closely the fields of medieval law and medieval literature, and to provide insight into the intellectual, emotional and social dimensions of legal and literary production across the period. Her interest in legal and literary culture takes her work into the history of emotion, historical linguistics, religious writing, poetry, poetics and rhetoric, as well as palaeography, codicology, and the history of law. In all of these dimensions, Anya’s research is driven by a fascination with the minutiae of language, and the potential of its smallest detail to solve the puzzles of the past.
