Dr Michael Lysander Angerer

Supervisor: Professor Laura Ashe

Research Interests: Translation theory, multilingualism and multilingual manuscripts, medieval historiography, national identity, narrative theory, verse poetics, Arthurian romance, North Sea literature

I am currently the Newby Trust Junior Research Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge.

I am a literary historian and translation theorist, and I work on medieval English literature and its place in the multilingual literary landscape around the North Sea. My research combines approaches from literary history, translation theory, and manuscript studies to explore how literary traditions were shaped by cross-language contacts and interactions. Accordingly, I work across Old and Middle English, Latin, Old French, Old Norse, Old Saxon, Old Frisian, Old and Middle Dutch and Middle High German. My work on the medieval literatures of Northwestern Europe has appeared in journals including the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Exemplaria, New Medieval Literatures, and Neophilologus. Two of my recent articles have been awarded the 2023 Paul E. Szarmach Prize and the 2025 ISSEME Award for Best Article by an Early-Career Researcher. I am now working towards a new literary history of the medieval North Sea, focussing on the role of cultural exchange in shaping literary history.

Having grown up in Austria, I came to the UK in 2017 to read for a BA in English and French at Oriel College, as part of which I spent a year abroad at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. I then took up the Jeremy Griffiths Memorial Studentship at St Hilda’s College to complete an MSt in English (650–1550). My DPhil at Corpus Christi College was funded by the E. K. Chambers Studentship. In 2026, I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (FRHistS).

Research at Oxford

My doctoral research, supervised by Laura Ashe, re-evaluated the importance of poetic form as a way of shaping ‘national’ identities in a multilingual context – and what happens to these identities when poetic forms are translated. Specifically, I investigated how the translation of poetry shapes the construction of English identity in the multilingual history-writing of medieval England. Since poetry is deeply dependent on the features of one particular language, it can easily be cast as ‘untranslatable’ and become emblematic of one particular language and culture. This is visible in the different forms of verse inserted in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and in the ways in which they are (not) translated in the Latin translations of the Chronicle. But the Anglo-Norman and early Middle English verse chronicles of Geffrei Gaimar, Wace, and Laȝamon take a different stance. They use innovative verse forms to accommodate increasingly complex multilingual and multi-ethnic identities in the wake of the Norman Conquest. In the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, verse translation thus becomes a way of signalling the continuity of English history and identity across multiple languages and forms.

Teaching at Oxford

I was a College Lecturer in English at Corpus Christi College, where I taught Prelims Paper 1 (Introduction to English Language), Prelims Paper 2 (Early Medieval Literature, c. 650–1350), and FHS Paper 2 (Literature in English 1350–1550). I have also taught on early medieval literature at Worcester College and on historical linguistics and modern medievalisms within the English Faculty, and I have experience supervising undergraduate dissertations. I am an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA).

Peer-Reviewed Publications

—‘Not Quite Conquering Rome: Old Frisian Poetry and the Translatio Imperii to the North Sea Periphery’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology (forthcoming 2027)

—‘Old English beyond England: Ælfric, False Gods, and North Sea Literature’, Early Medieval England and its Neighbours, 52 (2026), e11 [open access]

—‘The Multilingual Dynamics of History in the Margins of MS Laud Misc. 636’, in The Multilingual Dynamics of Medieval Literature in Western Europe, c. 1200–c. 1600, ed. by Bart Besamusca, Lisa Demets, and Jelmar Hugen (Turnhout: Brepols, 2025), pp. 53–71 [open access]

— ‘Hebban olla vogala: An Eleventh-Century Link Between Dutch and English Literary History’, Neophilologus, 108.3 (2024), 467–84 [open access]
(Awarded the 2025 ISSEME Award for Best Article by an Early-Career Researcher; featured in the Dutch and Flemish national press)

— ‘Arthurian Worldbuilding around the Round Table: Wace’s History, Chrétien’s Fictions, and Continental Romance’, New Medieval Literatures, 24 (2024), 32–59

— ‘Gaimar's Estoire des Engleis, Line 6460: What Gaimar did with the Books of the Welsh’, Notes and Queries, 71.1 (2024), 11–13 [open access]

— ‘Domesticating Prophecy in Verse: The Translation Strategy and Politics of Merlínusspá’, Saga-Book, 47 (2023), 5–26 [open access]

— ‘Translatio Studii as Literary Innovation: Marie de France’s Fresne and the Cultural Authority of Translation’, Exemplaria, 34.4 (2022), 341–62 [open access]

— ‘Beyond “Germanic” and “Christian” Monoliths: Revisiting Old English and Old Saxon Biblical Epics’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 120.1 (2021), 73–92 [open access]
(Awarded the 2023 Paul E. Szarmach Article Prize for the best first article on a topic in the culture and history of early medieval England)