Mr Michael Lysander Angerer, Clare

mla62@cam.ac.uk

 

Biographical Information

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

Having grown up in Austria, I came to the UK for a BA in English and French at Oriel College, Oxford, as part of which I spent a year at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. I then stayed at Oxford for an MSt in English at St Hilda’s College and a DPhil in English at Corpus Christi College, where I also taught linguistics and medieval English literature as a College Lecturer in English.

Research Interests

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. I am also more broadly interested in medieval translation, multilingualism, history-writing, romance, and the poetics of verse.

My doctoral research examined how translation processes within medieval English history-writing transformed the construction of English identity between the tenth and fourteenth centuries. I have also published more widely on the medieval literatures of Northwestern Europe. My work has appeared in journals including the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Exemplaria, New Medieval Literatures, and Neophilologus, and 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 currently working towards a new literary history of the medieval North Sea before c. 1300. By moving beyond national approaches to literature, this project will focus on the role of cultural exchange in shaping literary history.

I lecture and supervise for the English Tripos Part IB, Paper 3: English Literature and its Contexts, 1066–1350.

I am also one of the coordinators for the Pillar Humans and Their Literatures of the Global Humanities Initiative at MIT.

Selected Publications

‘Old English beyond England: Ælfric, False Gods, and North Sea Literature’, Early Medieval England and its Neighbours (forthcoming)

‘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

‘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)