Professor Gareth Lloyd Evans awarded Leverhulme Research Fellowship

With support from the Leverhulme Trust, Professor Evans will offer the first sustained examination of trans lives in the Viking world and of the afterlives of trans vikings in contemporary culture. By uncovering narratives of trans, non-binary and gender-fluid individuals from Viking-Age Scandinavian archaeology, and Old Norse myth, legend and saga, Professor Evans’ interdisciplinary project will recover the stories of trans individuals and figures that are rarely acknowledged in Old Norse scholarship.

As the project follows the figure of the trans viking across a range of contemporary cultural works, it will explore how our twenty-first century understanding of gender in Old Norse literature and culture has been interpreted and remediated by graphic novels, young adult fiction, literary fiction, television and film. How, it will ask, do the audiences for these contemporary creative works respond to the representation and inclusion of the trans viking?

The Fellowship will result in a monograph, provisionally entitled Karlkona: Trans Lives of the Viking World. We look forward to its publication, and all other fruits of this fantastically interesting project.

Congratulations, Gareth!