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Dr Orietta Da Rold

da rold, oriettaDott. in Ling. and Lett. Straniere (IULM, Milan), MA (Sheffield), PhD (De Montfort, Leicester)

Lecturer

Contact Details:

Research Interests

Dr Da Rold’s research interests are in Medieval Literature c. 1100-1500, Chaucer and the digital humanities. She researches how literature is influenced by questions of authorship, reading-habits and book production. She works on the social and cultural context of the circulation and transmission of medieval texts and books, and researches the codicology and palaeography of medieval manuscripts. She has published articles and books on the examination of Old and Middle English literary traditions from a material perspective, and on the use of electronic media in the humanities. She co-edited several books, including Textual Culture, Cultural Texts, 1000-2010 (Boydell & Brewer, 2010) and The Production and Use of English Manuscript: 1060 to 1220 (Leicester, 2010, e-book). She is also the editor of a forthcoming edition of the Canterbury Tales entitled A Digital Facsimile of Cambridge, University Library, MS Dd.4.24 of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (forthcoming hriOnline).

Her current project is a monograph length study of the revolutionary impact of paper in medieval manuscript production, whose initial stages were funded by 'The Bibliographical Society' with a Falconer Madan Award, which led to a visiting scholarship at Wolfson College, Oxford. 

Her interest in the History of the Book translates in the Fellows’ Special Interest Group of the English Association on ‘The History of Books and Texts', which she co-convenes with Elaine Treharne. Her interest in medieval manuscripts and technology lead to an ESF Exploratory Workshop (co-applicant with Wendy Scase Birmingham) 'Applying Semantic Web Technologies To Medieval Manuscript Research', which took place in Birmingham in late March 2009. The ESF workshop inspired a new digital humanities project: Manuscripts Online (JISC, e-content Capital Programme), co-directed by Dr Da Rold and Michael Pidd (HRI, SHeffield). This is a major collaborative project which will enable users to search a very large body of online primary resources relating to written and early printed culture in Britain during the period 1000 to 1500.

Dr Da Rold has organised an international conference with Dr Philip Shaw (University of Leicester) and Aidan Conti ( University of Bergen) entitled: Writing Europe before 1450: A Colloquium (University of Bergen, 3rd-5th June 2012). She organised the 2007 and 2010 run of the Writing England Conference (University of Leicester). In 2009, she convened Quadrivium V (University of Leicester, 4-5 November), a postgraduate event funded by the Innovation Fund, Graduate School, University of Leicester and University of Birmingham, and is currently organising Quadrivium VIII in Sheffield under the auspices of the 'Manuscripts Online' Project. She organises sessions at the major international medieval conferences at Leeds and Kalamazoo. She sat on the New Chaucer Society Programming Committee.

She is the editor of the late medieval section of Literature Compass, associate editor of Digital Medievalist, sits on the Digital Medievalist Executive Board. She is a member of the European Science Foundation (ESF) Pool of Reviewers, and a member of the advisory board of the Manuscripts of Ælfric's Catholic Homilies, lead by Kathryn Lowe (University of Glasgow) for the Mellon Foundation, ‘Making Medieval English Manuscripts: New Knowledge, New Technologies’.

Projects

Postgraduate Supervision

Dr Da Rold has supervised a number of MA dissertations on Chaucer and medieval textual culture and literature. She is currently supervising one PhD on the identification of dialectal features specific to areas of Northern English, and is co-supervising one PhD student based at the University of Leeds on the AHRC-funded project, The Production and Use of English Manuscripts 1060 to 1220. 

She would welcome research proposals on:

  • Chaucer;
  • Medieval literature in context;
  • Authorship, reading-habits and book production (1000-1500);
  • Manuscript studies (1000-1500);
  • Medieval material textual cultures, including focused codicological, palaeographical and linguistic studies;
  • Medieval studies and digital humanities;
  • Editing and Textual Studies.

Recently completed PhD theses

Thomas Gobbitt, ‘Law in English Manuscripts 1060 to 1220’.

Teaching and Administration

Teaching

Current Administrative Roles

  • Director MA in English Studies  
  • Medieval Research Centre Committee
  • Graduate Committee
  • Postgraduate Student and Staff Committee

Recent Publications

Full list of publications

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