Dr. M. J. Toswell
Professor, The University of Western Ontario

D.Phil., University of Oxford, 1991 - Faculty of English Language and Literature
BA (Hons.), McMaster University, 1983 - English and Spanish

My primary research concerns the most popular text available in Anglo-Saxon England, the biblical book of psalms. I principally study psalter manuscripts, especially the bilingual psalters in prose and poetry which account for about a fifth of the surviving texts in Old English (English as it was spoken and written before about 1100). I work on their codicology, their preparation and layout in manuscripts before the thirteenth century. At the moment, with my colleague M.S. Griffith at New College, Oxford, I am editing the longest surviving poem in Old English, a translation of the psalms known as the Paris Psalter.

I also work in the field of medievalism, the modern reception of the Middle Ages, and have published on a range of modern British and Canadian responses to the medieval period. At the moment, I am pursuing a major project on the medieval university and its reflection in various elements of the modern university, and a project in Canadian medievalism more specifically. I am finishing up a series of projects on the Anglo-Saxon medievalism of the great hispano-american writer and thinker, Jorge Luis Borges. There are also a couple of articles in preparation on nineteenth-century medievalists, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the clutch of women who really built the field of Anglo-Saxon studies, but with no public recognition whatsoever.

In my spare time I teach and read speculative fiction, both science fiction and fantasy; read in the field of academic freedom and governance; and serve as an affiliate member of the Department of Women's Studies and Feminist Research.