This page shows the staff for the University of Nottingham's School of English in the UK. Please see here for the School of Education and English in China and the School of English in Malaysia.
Kate Olley
Assistant Professor in Viking Studies, Faculty of Arts
Contact
Biography
As an undergraduate, Kate studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Trinity College, Cambridge. She then moved to Newnham College to study for her MPhil, funded by a Newton Trust Award from the Cambridge Home and European Scholarship Scheme (2014-15). She returned to Trinity College for her DPhil, funded by an AHRC-Trinity studentship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Training Partnership (2015-18). Her doctoral research explored the nature of kinship in Old Norse myth and legend, focusing especially on parent-child relationships, and was supervised by Dr Judy Quinn. She subsequently spent a year as a Teaching Fellow in Old Norse at University College London (2018-19), before becoming the VH Galbraith Junior Research Fellow in Medieval Studies at St Hilda's College, Oxford (2020-23) and a Research Associate on the ERC-funded BODY-POLITICS project at the University of Leicester (2023). She joined the University of Nottingham in 2023.
Teaching Summary
Kate teaches on the following modules:
- Academic Community
- Beginnings of English
- The Viking World
- Ice and Fire
- The Viking Mind
- Reading Old Norse
- Contextualising Old Norse
Research Summary
Kate's research interests include kinship, childbirth, the body, and emotions in Old Norse literature. Her first monograph Kinship in Old Norse Myth and Legend was published by Boydell and Brewer in… read more
Recent Publications
Kate is affiliated with the European Research Council-funded BODY-POLITICS project head by Dr Marianne Hem Eriksen and hosted at the University of Leicester.
Kate is also part of an international team of researchers, headed by Dr Jonathan Hui, working to translate a selection of the riddarasögur (Chivalric sagas) into English for the forthcoming volume Chivalric Romances from Medieval Iceland.
Current Research
Kate's research interests include kinship, childbirth, the body, and emotions in Old Norse literature. Her first monograph Kinship in Old Norse Myth and Legend was published by Boydell and Brewer in July 2022 and she is currently working on her second monograph, Childbirth in Old Norse Literature, which explores the literary depiction and cultural significance of childbirth in medieval Iceland. Engaging with anthropological analyses of birth as a moment of social microcosm, the book examines how birth narratives reflect and challenge the underlying power structures and knowledge systems of Old Norse society.
KATHERINE MARIE OLLEY, 2022. Re-assessing Pseudo-Procreation in Old Norse Literature. Saga-Book. 46, 93–118
KATHERINE MARIE OLLEY, 2022. Kinship in Old Norse Myth and Legend D. S. Brewer.
KATHERINE MARIE OLLEY, 2021. Co-Presence and Consumption: Eating Kin(ship) in Old Norse Myth and Legend. Journal of English and Germanic Philology. 120(4), 490–515 KATHERINE MARIE OLLEY, 2018. Labour Pains: Scenes of Birth and Becoming in Old Norse Legendary Literature. Quaestio Insularis: Selected Proceedings of the Cambridge Colloquium in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic. 18, 46–77 JONATHAN Y. H. HUI, CAITLIN ELLIS, JAMES MCINTOSH, KATHERINE MARIE OLLEY, WILLIAM NORMAN and KIMBERLY ANDERSON, 2018. Ála flekks saga: A Text, Translation and Introduction Leeds Studies in English. 49, 1–43 JONATHAN Y. H. HUI, CAITLIN ELLIS, JAMES MCINTOSH and KATHERINE MARIE OLLEY, 2018. Ála flekks saga: A Snow White Variant from Late Medieval Iceland. Leeds Studies in English. 49, 45–64