Elaine Treharne in Spain

Professor Elaine Treharne, a native of Wales, joined the Stanford faculty in 2012 in the School of Humanities and Sciences as a professor of English. In 2013, she became the inaugural Roberta Bowman Denning Professor in Humanities. In 2018, she became the Robert K. Packard Fellow in Undergraduate Education and from 2022-2025, she was Senior Associate Vice-Provost for Undergraduate Education. She is the director of Stanford Text Technologies, co-director of SILICON, and the former director of Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis and of the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Her main research focuses on archives and memory, the long history of technologies of communication with a specialization in medieval British manuscripts and Early English literature. She is working on many projects that are centered around the history of handwriting, including the recovery of women scribes in the high Middle Ages, and how handwriting is understood in the digital environment. She is researching a new book on the field of British Manuscript Studies and a new study of The Handmade. In 2024, she published Disrupting Categories, 1050 to 1250: Rethinking the Humanities with Premodern Texts; and in 2021, she published Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book with Oxford University Press. 

On our program, Professor Treharne will lecture on the world’s greatest books as objects, with a special focus, too, on earlier technologies of art and writing specific to southern Spain.

At Stanford:

• Roberta Bowman Denning Professorship in the Humanities, School of Humanities, since 2013

• Professor by courtesy of German studies, since 2013

• Professor of Comparative Literature, since 2021

• Professor of English, since 2012

• Director, Stanford Text Technologies, since 2014

• Fellow of the Stanford Impact Labs, 2024–2025

• Co-Director of Stanford SILICON, since 2023

• Co-director, Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2013–2016

• Director of the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, 2016–2019

• Fellow of the Clayman Institute for Gender Studies, 2021–2022

• Senior Associate Vice-Provost for Undergraduate Education, since 2022

• Recipient of Stanford's Lyman Award for outstanding faculty service to alumni, 2023

Other Roles and Positions:

• President of the Teachers of Old English in Britain and Ireland, since 2021

• Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, since 2007

• Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, since 2008

• Fellow of the English Association, since 2016

• Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales, since 2020

• At University of Leicester: affiliate faculty, 2009–2018; professor, medieval literature, 2002–2009; dean, faculty of arts, 2006; Head of Department of English, 2000–2004; co-director, medieval research center, 1998–2006

• Professor, Early English and Text Technologies, 2007–2012, Florida State University