Brewer, Professor Charlotte

Job Title: Professor of English Language and Literature, CUF Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow
College: Hertford
Period/ Subject: Medieval, Language

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Research Interests:

I began my research career as a medievalist, with publications on the late Middle English poem Piers Plowman and its textual and editing history, e.g. Piers Plowman: the Z Version (ed. with A. G. Rigg, Toronto, 1983) and Piers Plowman: the Evolution of the Poem (Cambridge University Press, 1996; reprinted 2006). I retain Middle English research interests but for the moment I am working on the history and character of the Oxford English Dictionary. Much of this research can be seen on my website Examining the OED.

My book on the OED in the 20th and early 21st centuries, Treasure-House of the Language: the Living OED, was published by Yale University Press in 2007, and since then I have investigated OED's treatment of contentious terms relating to sex and gender, politics, and 'correct' usage. Over 2009 I am holding a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to explore OED's treatment of female-authored quotation sources of the eighteenth century.

Teaching Areas:

Old and Middle English; History of the Language.

Recent Publications:

Book
Treasure-House of the Language: the Living OED, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2007

Articles in peer-reviewed journals or contributions to edited books
--‘The OED as “literary instrument”: its treatment past and present of the vocabulary of Virginia Woolf’, Notes & Queries, forthcoming 2009
--'The Use of Literary Quotations in the OED’, Review of English Studies, forthcoming 2009
--'The Oxford English Dictionary's treatment of female-authored sources of the eighteenth century', in Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Wim wan der Wurff (eds.), Current Issues in Late Modern English, Peter Lang, Bern, 2009, 209-38
-- Bio-critical accounts of W. W. Skeat and R. W. Burchfield for Lexicon Grammaticorum, H. Stammerjohann (ed.), Walter de Gruyter, Berlin & New York, 2009, 231-2 & 1405-6
--'The Oxford Quarto Dictionary', Henry Sweet Society Bulletin 51 (2008), 25-40
--'The Oxford English Dictionary Supplements', in A. Cowie, ed, Oxford History of Lexicography, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008, 260-78
--'Johnson, Webster, and The Oxford English Dictionary', in H. Momma and M. Matto, ed., Blackwell Companion to the History of the English Language, Blackwell, Oxford, 2008, 113-121
--'Pronouncing the P: Prescription or Description in English 19th- and 20th-century dictionaries?', Historiographia Linguistica 2/3 (2007), 257-80
--'Reporting Eighteenth-Century Vocabulary in The Oxford English Dictionary', in John Considine, ed., Words and Dictionaries from the British Isles, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007, 104-129
--'Eighteenth-Century Quotation Searches in the Oxford English Dictionary', in English Historical Lexis (HEL-LEX), ed. R. W. McConchie et al. Somerville, MA, Cascadilla, 2006, 41-50
--'Authority and Personality: Usage Labels in the Oxford English Dictionary, Transactions of the Philological Society 103 (2005), 261-301
--Women and the Archive: the representation of gender in the Dictionary of National Biography and the Oxford English Dictionary', article written jointly with Elizabeth Baigent and Vivienne Larminie, Archives (Journal of the British Records Association) xxx no. 113 (2005), 1-23

Other Information:

I have been a tutorial fellow at Hertford College since 1990, working half-time from 1998 to 2004 to look after my three children. After completing my eighteenth-century research I hope to develop a project on dictionaries and society in the 20th century.

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