On April 21, we will be holding a Faculty Confab Roundtable with Dr. Nelson Goering, Dr. Carl Anderson, Dr. Melissa Mayus, and Dr. Paul Peterson from 3 – 4:30 PM EDT.
The roundtable participants will explore All Things Norse, including but not limited to:
- Adaptations of Norse stories in modern literature (timely, with Gaiman’s recent Norse Mythology)
- The Norse influence on English (including the recent exciting idea that English is a North Germanic language)
- The variety of forms and topics in Norse poetry
- The challenges particular to teaching Norse
Participant Bios
Nelson Goering grew up in the Ocooch Mountains in Wisconsin, and earned his BA at Grinnell College, Iowa. He completed his DPhil in comparative philology from Oxford in 2016 with a thesis on the linguistic aspects of Germanic alliterative meter. His wider research interests center on the philology of the older Germanic and Indo-European languages. He is a lifelong reader of Tolkien and is particularly interested in the intersection of Tolkien’s philological academic life with his creative works. He teaches Germanic and Tolkienian philology for Signum.
Carl Edlund Anderson holds an A.B. in Folklore & Mythology (with a focus on Medieval Scandinavia) from Harvard College and a Ph.D. from the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, & Celtic at the University of Cambridge. He is currently a lecturer for Signum University’s Introduction to Old Norse course, and also teaches in postgraduate university programs for English-language teachers in Colombia, South America. Besides work on medieval and Germanic philology, he has published on topics in bilingual education and indigenous languages of Colombia.
Melissa Mayus completed her Ph.D. at the University of Notre Dame in 2015 with a dissertation on conceptions of free will in Old English poetry. She previously completed an MA in English at Saint Louis University and an MA in Medieval Icelandic Studies at the University of Iceland. She currently holds a visiting position in the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University where she teaches Old English.
Paul Peterson is currently a postdoctoral research scholar at the University of Iowa. He holds a master’s and Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in Germanic Medieval Studies (2015), and a second master’s from the University of Iceland in Medieval Icelandic Studies (2012). His dissertation was on Old Norse Nicknames. His scholarly interests are varied across the field of Germanic philology, and include Old Norse language and literature, Old Saxon, Old English, and Gothic.
