Professor Gareth Lloyd Evans

I specialise in the languages and literatures of medieval Scandinavia and medieval England. My BA and MA are both from Durham University and I completed my doctorate at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. I was then for a short time Teaching Fellow in Old Norse at Durham, before moving to St Hilda's College, Oxford, first as Stipendiary Lecturer in Medieval Literatures and then as Rebecca Marsland Career Development Fellow in English. I joined St John's College as Tutorial Fellow in English in 2024, at the same time taking up the post of Associate Professor of Old Norse in the Oxford English Faculty.

Teaching

For St John's, I teach Old English, Middle English, approaches to English language, and literary and critical theory. For the university, I teach various courses on Old Norse, and supervise MSt, MPhil and DPhil students.

My primary field of research is Old Norse-Icelandic literature and I have secondary research interests in Old and Middle English literature. I am particularly interested in questions of gender, sexuality, and emotion, and of identity more broadly; I am also interested in questions of poetics and style.

I am currently working on two book projects. The first is a monograph entitled The Poetics of Emotion in Saga Narrative, which reconsiders how we read, engage with, and understand Old Norse saga narrative through a comprehensive study of emotional representation in the Íslendingasögur (sagas of Icelanders). The second is a trade monograph – Karlkona: Trans Lives of the Viking World – which uncovers narratives of trans, non-binary and gender fluid individuals from Viking Age Scandinavian archaeology, and Old Norse myth, legend, and saga. I am also co-editing a number of volumes – two on Old Norse emotion and one on cross-temporal comparative literatures – and I lead the AHRC-funded Old Norse Emotion Network.

I am a Council Member of the Viking Society for Northern Research and am one of the editors of its journal, Saga-Book of the Viking Society for Northern Research. I am a steering committee member and treasurer of the Gender and Medieval Studies Group, and am a member of the editorial board for the Brepols book series, Gender and Sexuality in the Global Middle Ages. I am also co-convenor of the Old Norse in Oxford Research Seminar.

Publications

(with Caz Batten), 'The Critical Study of Masculinities in Old English Literature', English Studies 105.4 (2024)

‘Sigvatr’s Tears: The Phenomenology of Emotion in Skaldic Verse’, Leeds Medieval Studies 2 (2022), 75-99.

'Female Masculinity and the Sagas of Icelanders’, in Gareth Lloyd Evans and Jessica Clare Hancock (eds.), Masculinities in Old Norse Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020), 59-76.

(ed. with Jessica Clare Hancock), Masculinities in Old Norse Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020).

Men and Masculinities in the Sagas of Icelanders (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

For a full list of publications, please see my profile on the Faculty website.