Dr Francesca Brooks

Biography

I joined UCC in September 2025 as a Lecturer in Old English. Before joining the School of English and Digital Humanities, I held teaching posts at University College London, King’s College London and Manchester Metropolitan University. From 2020 to 2024 I was Leverhulme Early Career Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of York, where I undertook an individual research project titled ‘Divine Abstraction: Medieval Modern Networks of Faith and Culture’. I was awarded my AHRC-funded PhD by King’s College London in 2018.

Research Interests

My research explores the meeting point between medieval and modern literary culture in the twentieth-century archive. I am interested both in how medieval texts shape communities of readers and forge identities, and how the material of the medieval past has allowed late modernist writers and artists to unearth radical, cross-cultural histories of British and Irish identity. In this work, place and local environment are something shared by medieval and modern literature, a space for negotiating national, regional, religious, and gendered identity; I trace these histories in the modern archive.

My first monograph, Poet of the Medieval Modern: Reading the Early Medieval Library with David Jones (Oxford University Press, 2021), won the University English Book Prize 2022. I have also published on sensory perceptions of the early medieval liturgy in England; the influence of liturgical innovation on vernacular Passion poetry (both medieval and modernist); gendered relationships to space and place in the Old English elegies and the writing of Welsh artist-author Brenda Chamberlain; and medieval translation and recreation in the archives of Edwin Morgan. With Carl Kears I am co-editor of Beyond Medieval Archives: Rethinking the medieval archive through creative and critical practice, which will be published Open Access by UCL Press in 2026.

In addition to my interests as a researcher, I am a poet and a writer with creative work published in PN Review, gorse, 3AM, and Propel Magazine, amongst others. These creative interests feed into my teaching and public engagement. With Fran Allfrey and Carl Kears, I co-run the Revoicing Medieval Poetry network, an ongoing collaborative project that includes cycles and sequences of workshops, labs, exchanges, readings and performances that carve out spaces for creative and collective engagements with medieval poetry and its materials. I’ve also worked with heritage institutions like the York Museums Trust and prize-winning writers including Anthony Vahni Capildeo and Rowan Evans to bring workshops to the public as well as students. In 2019-20 I was Academic Lead for the UCL Creative Fellowship Programme, 'New Old English: Performance, Poetry, Practice', which saw Fen develop their performance based on the Old English poem Wulf and Eadwacer in dialogue with staff and students at the university.

Books

Year

Publication

(2021)

Poet of the Medieval Modern: Reading the Early Medieval Library with David Jones.

Francesca Brooks (2021). Poet of the Medieval Modern: Reading the Early Medieval Library with David Jones. Textual Perspectives Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Details]

Edited books

Year

Publication

2026

Beyond Medieval Archives: Rethinking the Medieval Archive through Creative and Critical Approaches

Francesca Brooks and Carl Kears, ed. (2026), Beyond Medieval Archives: Rethinking the Medieval Archive through Creative and Critical Approaches. London: UCL Press.

Peer reviewed journals

Year	Publication
2024	‘Medieval Translation and Recreation in Edwin Morgan and Derek Jarman’s archives: Dialogue’ Francesca Brooks and E. K. Myerson (2024), ‘Medieval Translation and Recreation in Edwin Morgan and Derek Jarman’s archives: Dialogue’, postmedieval, 15.2, essay cluster on ‘Forgeries’, ed., Hannah Armstrong and Rebecca Menmuir, 503-28. [Details].
2024	‘About the Cover Text’ Francesca Brooks (2024), ‘About the Cover Text’, postmedieval, 15.2, 295-99. [Details]
2023	‘The Haunted Island: The Medieval Past and the Old English elegies in Brenda Chamberlain’s Tide-race (1962)’ Francesca Brooks (2023), ‘The Haunted Island: The Medieval Past and the Old English elegies in Brenda Chamberlain’s Tide-race (1962)’, The Review of English Studies, 74, 860-80. [Details]
2018	‘Liturgy, Performance, and Poetry of the Passion: David Jones and The Dream of the Rood’ Francesca Brooks (2018), ‘Liturgy, Performance, and Poetry of the Passion: David Jones and The Dream of the Rood’, ‘David Jones Special Issue’, Religion & Literature, 49, 83-92.[Details]
2016	‘A Gift for the Illuminated Sphere’ Fran Allfrey and Francesca Brooks (2016), ‘A Gift for the Illuminated Sphere’, Textual Practice, 30, 15-7. [Details].

Book Chapters

Year	Publication
2026	‘Introduction’ Francesca Brooks and Carl Kears, ed. (2026), ‘Introduction’, in Francesca Brooks and Carl Kears, ed., Beyond Medieval Archives: Rethinking the Medieval Archive through Creative and Critical Approaches. London: UCL Press.
2026	‘Towards an archive of Revoicing Medieval Poetry’ Fran Allfrey, Francesca Brooks, and Carl Kears (2026), ‘Towards an archive of Revoicing Medieval Poetry’, in Brooks and Kears, ed., Beyond Medieval Archives: Rethinking the Medieval Archive through Creative and Critical Approaches. London: UCL Press.
2020	‘The Crafting of Sound in the Riddles of the Exeter Book’. Francesca Brooks (2020), ‘The Crafting of Sound in the Riddles of the Exeter Book’, in Riddles at Work in the Early Medieval Tradition, eds., Megan Cavell and Jennifer Neville. Manchester: Manchester University Press. [Details]
2016	‘Sight, Sound and the Perception of the Anglo-Saxon Liturgy in Exeter Book Riddles 48 and 59’ Francesca Brooks (2016), ‘Sight, Sound and the Perception of the Anglo-Saxon Liturgy in Exeter Book Riddles 48 and 59’, in Sensory Perception in the Medieval West, eds., Michael Bintley and Simon Thomson. Utrecht: Brepols, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy. [Details]

Other Essays

Year	Publication
2025	‘A Quest for the Camaldolese Grail: In the footsteps of Lynette Roberts’ Francesca Brooks (2025), ‘A Quest for the Camaldolese Grail: In the footsteps of Lynette Roberts’, PN Review 285. [Details]
2021	‘Landlocked’ Francesca Brooks (2021), ‘Landlocked’, The Clearing, Little Toller Press [Details]
2022	‘Scrapbooking Old English with Edwin Morgan – “the nerves must sometimes tingle and the skin flush”’ Francesca Brooks (2022), ‘Scrapbooking Old English with Edwin Morgan – “the nerves must sometimes tingle and the skin flush”’, The Glasgow University Library Blog [Details]
2020	‘New Old English: Performance, Poetry, Practice’ Francesca Brooks (2020), ‘New Old English: Performance, Poetry, Practice’ TOEBI Newsletter, 37, pp. 43-4 [Details]
2016	‘New Ways to Know the Medieval: Creativity, Pedagogy & Public Engagement’ Fran Allfrey, Francesca Brooks, Joshua Davies, Rebecca Hardie, Carl Kears, Clare A. Lees, Kathryn Maude, James Paz, Hana Videen and Victoria Walker (2016), ‘New Ways to Know the Medieval: Creativity, Pedagogy & Public Engagement’, Old English Newsletter, 46 [Details]
2016	‘The Place of Poetry’ Francesca Brooks and Jess Cotton (2016), ‘The Place of Poetry’, Being Human Festival Blog [Details]

Book Reviews

Year	Publication
2024	Francesca Brooks (2024), ‘Pippa Marland, Ecocriticism and the Island: Readings from the British-Irish Archipelago’, Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 28, 121-3. [Details]
2019	Francesca Brooks (2019), ‘Poetry and the Listening Ear: Review of Hearing Things by Angela Leighton’, Cambridge Quarterly, 48, 397-402. [Details]
2019	Francesca Brooks (2019), ‘Thomas Berenato, Anne Price-Owen and Kathleen Henderson Staudt, eds., David Jones on Religion, Politics, and Culture: Unpublished Prose’, Review of English Studies, 70, 791-3. [Details]
2018	Francesca Brooks (2018), ‘Poetry’s Imagined Community: Review of The Plural of Us by Bonnie Costello’, Cambridge Quarterly, 47, 279-85. [Details]
2016	Francesca Brooks (2016), ‘“A Deeply Textured Trove of Learning and Reference”: The Gift of David Jones (review of Vision and Memory: The Art of David Jones, Ariane Bankes and Paul Hills)’, Marginalia at the LA Review of Books. [Details]

Employment

Employer	Position	From/To
Manchester Metropolitan University	PhD Training Co-ordinator and Tutor in English	04/24 – 09/25
University of York	Leverhulme Early Career Fellow	09/20 – 02/24
University College London	Associate Lecturer (Teaching Fellow) in Old and Middle English Literature	09/18 – 08/20

Teaching Interests

Old English Literature and culture

Medieval translations and adaptations

Poetry and poetics

Medievalism and Reception Studies

Ecocriticism and Literary Geographies

Modernism and the archive

English Department Roinn an Bhéarla