Renée Trilling
Professor and Angus Cameron Professor of Old English, Centre for Medieval Studies and Department of English
Renée R. Trilling is a professor and the Angus Cameron Professor of Old English in the Centre for Medieval Studies and the Department of English. She specializes in the language, literature, and culture of England in the pre-Conquest period.
Trilling’s first monograph, The Aesthetics of Nostalgia: Historical Representation in Old English Verse explores the relationship between poetic form and historical consciousness in early English vernacular verse, and was recognized with the Best First Book Award from the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England in 2011. She is also author of the Oxford Bibliography of Old English Literature and Critical Theory and co-editor of A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Studies, Textual Identities in Early Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, and Feminist Approaches to Early Medieval English Studies. She is a former editor of Old English for the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, published by the University of Illinois Press.
Trilling’s research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Humanities Research Institute and Center for Advanced Study at Illinois. She has published articles on Beowulf, Wulfstan the Homilist, Ælfric’s hagiography, vernacular historiography, wisdom poetry, and early medieval medicine, focusing on issues of gender, materiality, nostalgia, and literary form. Her current work draws on posthumanist trends in neuroscience, quantum physics, and philosophy to explore the role of materiality in early medieval notions of subjectivity.
Before joining the University of Toronto, Trilling taught at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign from 2004-2023. She earned her PhD in English from the University of Notre Dame.