Timothy Bourns

Timothy Bourns is Assistant Professor of Old Norse in the Department of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Washington. Before joining UW, he held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Iceland and the University of British Columbia and was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at University College London. His research focuses on Old Norse literature and the premodern North through posthuman approaches, with particular emphasis on animality, materiality, and the environment, asking what happens to medieval literature (and to the humanities at large) when the human is decentered. He publishes on animal studies, ecocriticism, objects, emotions, dreams, and metaphor, and his scholarship also engages Old and Middle English literatures, Icelandic and Greenlandic traditions, mythology, medievalism, and fantasy. Broadly, he studies the history of narrative—what the stories we tell reveal about who we are, where we have been, and where we are going—positioning medieval literature within questions of enduring personal and global significance. Pedagogically, he foregrounds close reading and conceptual rigor, inviting students to encounter premodern texts reflectively and imaginatively, and to experience their lasting and transformative power.