Claire is spending two terms as the medieval English lecturer at Keble College Oxford, having recently completed her doctorate in medieval English at Trinity College Dublin.
She is currently working on her first book which will be a minigraph titled Lust and Chastity in Early English Texts, ca. 900 to ca. 1250. Her PhD spanned this same time period and used corpus linguistic methods alongside traditional close reading to examine the vocabulary of vice and virtue across Old and Middle English corpora, with a focus on saints’ lives as a genre which stays relatively stable pre and post Norman Conquest. Alongside her doctoral work she taught extensively at Trinity College Dublin on their Origins of English modules and a module of her own design, ‘Metaphor: from Medieval to Modern,’ which made use of Conceptual Metaphor Theory to examine historical English. She was also the lead postgraduate researcher for the Searobend Project (Seaorobend: Linked Metadata for English-Language Texts, 1000-1300) under Dr Mark Faulkner.
As lecturer in Old and Middle English at Keble College, Claire teaches all core medieval papers for the English Language and Literature degree, including the year one paper Prelims 2: English 650-1350; the second-year paper FHS 2: English 1350-1550, and is responsible for the Course II third years. She herself completed Course II in 2015 at Jesus College, and went on to complete both a postgraduate certificate in education (Leicester) and a Masters in Viking and Anglo-Saxon Studies (Nottingham), during which she got the chance to participate in an archaelogical dig at a Viking-Rus site in Ukraine, and found a Viking era axe head! Perhaps her proudest and most niche achievement to date has been completing some runes for the Marvel TV series Secret Invasion.