Knowing Oceans: The Early Medieval English North Sea

Knowing Oceans: The Early Medieval English North Sea

Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C).

Budget: ¥4,680,000. Project Number: 24K03704. (2024/04/01–2029/03/31).

Knowing Oceans: The Early Medieval English North Sea (hereafter KO North Sea) aims to investigate human interaction with the North Sea in the British Archipelago throughout the early Medieval period (c. 500–1200), and reveal how such interactions were conceptualized and utilised in literary productions. To achieve this goal, the project will bring together approaches from a number of fields, including literary studies, linguistics, archaeology, medieval studies, ecocriticism, environmental history, and historical climatology. To engage with such a wide variety of data, KO North Sea will employ tools from the digital humanities, particularly GIS databases and mapping, to better analyse the interdependent relationship between early medieval English peoples and their aqueous environment.

Articles:

‘The Deep: Grund and Saturated Textualities’ (in preparation).

Conference Presentations and Invited Lectures:

‘The Sea Gives and Takes: Islands Made and Unmade by the North Sea’, 41st Congress for the Japan Society for Medieval English Studies, Meiji University, December 13–14, 2025.

‘Oceanic Churn: The Blue Humanities’, Ex-position Talks and Faculty Colloquium, National Taiwan University, November 5, 2025.

‘Knowing Ocean(s:) Saturated Textualities along the North Sea’, International Medieval Congress, Leeds University, July 1–4, 2024.

‘The Deep: Grund as Seafloor in Old English Literature’, The 40th Conference for the West Branch of the Japan Society for Medieval English Studies, Hiroshima Shudo University, June 8, 2024.

‘Knowing Oceans: Early Medieval Seas’, International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England, online seminar, May 17, 2024. Invited Speaker.