Roberta Frank

Roberta Frank (born 1941) is an American philologist^[1] specializing in Old English and Old Norse language and literature. She is Marie Borroff Professor Emeritus of English^[2] at Yale University.

Career[]

Frank received a B.A. in comparative literature from New York University (1962) and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard University (1968), with a doctoral dissertation on Wordplay in Old English Poetry.^[3] Frank taught at the University of Toronto beginning in 1968, from 1978 as a full professor^[4] and from 1995 as University Professor. She was awarded a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1985.^[5] At Toronto, she was involved with the Dictionary of Old English project and served as Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies (1994–99).

In 2000, she joined the Department of English Language and Literature at Yale University, first as the Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of English and then, in 2008, as the Marie Borroff Professor of English. She is also a senior research fellow at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies.^[6] Frank was elected a fellow of the Medieval Academy of America in 1989,^[7] serving as the President of that Academy in 2006, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1995.^[8] She co-founded the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists (now the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England) in 1981 serving as First Vice-President (1985-1986), then as its president (1986–87).^[9][10]

Personal life[]

Frank was born in the Bronx.^[11] She is married to the medieval historian Walter Goffart.

Research[]

Frank's research draws upon archaeological as well as literary and linguistic evidence to analyze aspects of early English and Scandinavian texts. Her work has focused on the poetry of England and Scandinavia, including numerous publications on skaldic verse, the early North, and Beowulf.^[12][13][14] Two festschriften in her honor have been published: Verbal Encounters: Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse Studies, ed. Antonina Harbus and Russell Poole (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005) and The Shapes of Early English Poetry: Style, Form, History, ed. Eric Weiskott and Irina Dumitrescu (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2019). Her new book, The Etiquette of Early Northern Verse, is forthcoming from the University of Notre Dame Press.^{[citation needed]}

Selected works[]

• “Some Uses of Paronomasia in Old English Scriptural Verse” (1972)
• Co-editor, A Plan for the Dictionary of Old English (1973)
• Old Norse Court Poetry (1978)
• “The Beowulf Poet’s Sense of History” (1982)
• “Germanic Legend in Old English Literature” (1991)
• Frank, Roberta (1992). "Beowulf and Sutton Hoo: The Odd Couple". In Kendall, Calvin B. & Wells, Peter S. (eds.). Voyage to the Other World: The Legacy of the Sutton Hoo. Voyage to the Other World. Medieval Cultures. 5. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 47–64. ISBN 978-0-8166-2023-4. JSTOR 10.5749/j.ctttv0mr.8.
• “The Search for the Anglo-Saxon Oral Poet” (1993)
• “Like a Bridge of Stones” (2011)
• “Siegfried and Arminius: Scenes from a Marriage” (2013)
• Frank, Roberta (2008). "The Boar on the Helmet". In Karkov, Catherine E. & Damico, Helen (eds.). Aedificia Nova: Studies in Honor of Rosemary Cramp. Publications of the Richard Rawlinson Center. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University. pp. 76–88. ISBN 978-1-58044-110-0.

External links[]

• Yale University faculty page

References[]