Assistant Professor
Biography
DPhil, English (Old Norse), University of Oxford
MA, Medieval Icelandic Studies, University of Iceland
BASc, Arts & Science Program, McMaster University
Timothy Bourns is Assistant Professor of Old Norse in the Department of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Washington. He holds a doctorate in English (Old Norse) from St John's College, University of Oxford, and has held postdoctoral research fellowships at the University of Iceland and the University of British Columbia as well as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at University College London. His academic interests include Old Norse-Icelandic, Old and Middle English, Greenlandic, medievalism, and fantasy. He publishes on animal studies, ecocriticism, sustainability, objects, emotions, dreams, and myths.
Research
Selected Research
- 'Cats in Medieval Icelandic Life and Literature', in The Cat's Pyjamas: Cats in Culture and Society, eds. Charlotte Doesburg and Riitta Valijarvi (Freeland (Oxfordshire): Inter/Connexions) [forthcoming]
- 'Introducing Eco-Norse: Settlement, Environment, and Narrative in Medieval Iceland', in Eco-Norse: Essays on Old Norse Literature and the Environment, eds. Timothy Bourns and Carl Phelpstead (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, University College London) [forthcoming]
- 'Driftwood and the Divine: Ecocritical Readings of trémenn', in Eco-Norse: Essays on Old Norse Literature and the Environment, eds. Timothy Bourns and Carl Phelpstead (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, University College London) [forthcoming]
- 'Blood, Rain, and Tears: Eco-Emotive Metaphor in the Medieval North', in Cultural Models for Emotions in the North Atlantic Vernaculars, 700–1400, eds. Edel Porter and Javier E. Díaz-Vera (Turnhout: Brepols, 2025), 201–19
- 'Trees, Temporal Eternity, and the Norse Mythos', Medieval Ecocriticisms 5 (2025), 85–105
- 'A Way Forward? Discussing Colonial Entanglements and Medieval Studies: Postphase', with Cordelia Heß, Maya Sialuk Jacobsen, and Christian Koch Madsen, in Colonial Entanglements and the Medieval Nordic World: Norse Colonies and Indigenous Peoples, eds. Cordelia Heß, Solveig Marie Wang, and Erik Wolf (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, December 2024), 289–306
- ‘Can We Access a Counter-Narrative to the Vínland Sagas through Kalaallit Oqaluttualiaat?’, in Colonial Entanglements and the Medieval Nordic World: Norse Colonies and Indigenous Peoples, eds. Cordelia Heß, Solveig Marie Wang, and Erik Wolf (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, December 2024), 49–74
- ‘Animal Emotionality and Selfhood in Old Norse Textual Culture', Emotions: History, Culture, Society 8.1 (June, 2024), 97–115
- 'Trees in the Saga Dreamscape', in Ecocriticism and Old Norse Studies: Nature and the Environment in Old Norse Literature and Culture, eds. Reinhard Hennig, Emily Lethbridge, and Michael Schulte (Turnhout: Brepols, 2023), 65–85
- ‘Becoming-Animal in the Icelandic Sagas’, Neophilologus 105.4 (August, 2021), 633–53
- ‘The Language of Birds in Old Norse Tradition’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 120.2 (April, 2021), 209–38
- 'Meat and Taboo in Medieval Scandinavian Law and Literature', Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 14 (2018), 61–80
- 'Mythological and Heroic Motifs in Manx Stone Sculpture', in Viking Myths and Rituals on the Isle of Man, eds. Leszek Gardeła and Carolyne Larrington (Rzeszow: Mitel, 2014), 22–29