About
Mike Bintley is Associate Professor in Medieval English Literature
His teaching and research focuses on medieval texts, archaeology, and material culture with a focus on human-environmental interactions in the early Middle Ages.
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Research
Research interests
- Early Medieval Literature, Archaeology, and HistoryOld English, Old Norse, and Anglo-Latin textsEcocriticism, Ecotheory, and the Environmental/Blue Humanities4E cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive), exograms, and exogrammarPlant Studies, Trees and Woodland, Landscapes, Settlements, and Ruins
Current research
Mike’s research is transdisciplinary, focusing on the intersections of textual and material culture in relation to landscapes and environment, trees and plant-life, buildings and settlements, and minds and matter.
His current projects include An Anthology of Trees and Plant Life in the Earliest English Poetry: Treow Forms, which is forthcoming with Liverpool University Press in 2027, and Encounters: The Medieval Natural World in 50 Objects, which he is co-authoring with Dr Kate Franklin (Tufts) for Routledge.
His next major book project will be Vegetal Imaginaries of Early Medieval England, a book incorporating textual and material evidence using the framework of ‘exogrammar’, a theory of the Extended Mind, and he continues work on a creative nonfiction book about the landscapes and environments of early medieval England, entitled Eorð.
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Current research
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Supervision
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Teaching
I have taught Old English, Middle English, Old Norse, medievalisms, palaeography, and the history of the language at undergraduate and postgraduate level, and am particularly interested in teaching the inter- and transdisciplinary approaches that are central to my research.
At Southampton I direct 'Songs of the Earth: Landscapes and Environments of Early Medieval England', which approaches literature and other kinds of texts in their material and archaeological contexts, including works such as Beowulf. This is an optional module taken by second and third year students who are mainly pursuing studies in English, History, Archaeology.
I also convene the first-year module Literary Transformations, which examines the legacies of Homer's Odyssey and classical epic in later literatures written in English.
I contribute to a wide range of team-taught modules across undergraduate and postgraduate study, and have supervised doctoral students working on projects including gender, kingship, medievalism, landscapes and environments, otherworlds, and adaptation.
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Biography
Mike studied a BA in English Literature at UCL, specialising in Old and Middle English, Old Norse, and Modern and Contemporary literature. He then took an MA in Medieval Literature (again, at UCL), where he also studied early medieval archaeology. His PhD (still at UCL) was supervised between the department of English Language and Literature and the Institute of Archaeology. After finishing his PhD, Mike held fixed-term posts at UCL, Oxford, and Birkbeck, before joining Canterbury Christ Church University (2012-18) and then Birkbeck (2018-23). He joined Southampton in 2023, where he is currently Theme Lead for Culture, Environment and Sustainability at SIAH.
Mike is author of Trees in the Religions of Early Medieval England (Boydell, 2015); Settlements and Strongholds in Early Medieval England: Texts, Landscapes, and Material Culture (Brepols, 2020) which won the English Association's Beatrice White prize; and co-author of Landscapes and Environments of the Middle Ages (Routledge, 2023) with Dr Kate Franklin.
With Professor Richard North he edited and translated Andreas: An Edition (Liverpool University Press, 2016), and has co-edited a number of essay collections, including Trees and Timber in the Anglo-Saxon World (OUP, 2013); Representing Beasts in Early Medieval England and Scandinavia (Boydell, 2015); Sensory Perception in the Medieval West (Brepols, 2016); Stasis in the Medieval West?: Questioning Change and Continuity (Palgrave, 2017); Insular Iconographies: Essays in Honour of Jane Hawkes (Boydell, 2019); Transitions and Relationships Over Land and Sea in the Early Middle Ages of Northern Europe (Isle Heritage, 2023); Trees as Symbol and Metaphor in the Middle Ages: Comparative Contexts (Boydell 2024), which won ‘Best Book in Medieval Art’, in 2024 from the Association of Friends of the Centre for Early Medieval Studies of the Department of Art History, Masaryk University, Brno; and a ‘Plant Temporalities’ special issue of Medieval Ecocriticisms (2025).
Mike is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, the Royal Historical Society, and the Linnean Society. He edits the book series 'Nature and Environment in the Middle Ages' for Boydell, and the journal Medieval Ecocriticisms. His other affiliations include Teachers of Old English in Britain and Ireland, Medieval Ecocriticisms, the Viking Society for Northern Research, the Disinventing Old English group, the Colloquium for Early Medieval Studies, the Society for Medieval Archaeology, the Early Medieval Interdisciplinary Conference Series, and Clapton Community Football Club.
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