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Dr Mark Faulkner, M. A., M. St., D. Phil (Oxon), FTCD Ussher Associate Professor in Medieval Literature; Director, Trinity Centre for the Book; Director of Undergraduate Teaching and Learning (MT 2024); College Tutor

Research and Teaching Interests

I joined the School of English at Trinity in September 2016 after four years as Lecturer in Medieval English at the University of Sheffield, having previously taught at University College Cork and in Oxford, where I completed my D. Phil under the supervision of the late palaeographer M. B. Parkes. Partly in tribute to Malcolm, I co-edited the three-volume History of Punctuation in English Literature, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2025 with Jeff Guttierez (Boston), John Lennard (Cambridge) and Elizabeth Bonapfel (Berlin).

I began academic life a literary historian and have become variously a historical linguist, book historian, corpus linguist and digital humanist: in sum, a philologist. I am particularly known for my work on late Old English and early Middle English, especially my New Literary History of the Long Twelfth Century: Language and Literary History Between Old and Middle English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), which won the ISSEME First Monograph Award in 2023, and was described in The Review of English Studies as ‘a field-changing contribution to scholarship’ and ‘formidable achievement’. To make twelfth-century texts more accessible, I am currently editing A Critical Anthology of Twelfth-Century English: Writing the Vernacular in the Transitional Period for Arc Humanities Press.

Since 2016, with the help of over €1m of funding from Trinity, the Irish Research Council and Enterprise Ireland, I have been developing a corpus philology that seeks to apply corpus-linguistic, statistical and computational approaches to bring a new sense of quantitative precision to our understanding of the medieval textual record, and now work with a large research group of undergraduate, graduate and PhD students on these topics. In June 2017, with IRC New Foundations funding, I hosted a colloquium on Big Data and Medieval Studies: the Present and Future of Medieval Text Archives. Between 2019 and 2025, I have held a Provost’s Project Award for Medieval Big Dating, which began to explore quantitative and computational methods to develop ‘big data’ techniques to assist in the dating of texts from the Old and early Middle English periods. Between 2022 and 2024, I was PI on the IRC-Coalesce-funded project, Searobend: Linked Metadata for English-Language Texts, 1000-1300, a collaboration with Prof. Declan O’Sullivan, from the School of Computer Science and Statistics at TCD. I currently hold Trinity Long Room Hub Research Incentive Scheme, FAHSS Benefactions and Research Boost funding for Ansund: Using Machine Learning to Develop a New, Exhaustive, Open Access Corpus of Old English, a collaboration with Elisabetta Magnanti (Vienna), which is using techniques from machine vision to transcribe Old English manuscripts with new precision. From 2024-2028, I will be PI of Wandering Books, a TCD group-based Research Doctoral project, with four PhD students collaborating between English, Genetics and History, to develop new interdisciplinary approaches to localising medieval manuscripts. From 2024-2027, I will be a partner in the Erasmus+-funded network Antidote (Advanced Techniques for Editing Older Texts), based at the University of Reyjkavik and with partners in Prague, Venice, Lyon, Bratislava and the monastery of Klosterneuburg in Austria, giving training on large-scale cultural analytic techniques for the Middle Ages. I particularly welcome approaches from students interested in working on these emerging approaches.

I am a frequent speaker at international conferences on medieval literature, historical linguistics and medieval book history. I delivered plenary lectures at the 43rd Symposium on Old English, Middle English and Historical Linguistics in the Low Countries (Leiden, 2021), the 43rd International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (Sheffield, 2023) and the 13th International Conference on Middle English (Málaga, 2024). You can view a full list of my publications as part of my TCD research profile, and download many of them open access via my personal website.

At Trinity, with Laura Cleaver (now of the Institute of Advanced Studies in London) I co-developed the manuscript-focused, interdisciplinary M. Phil in Medieval Studies, which launched in 2019 and which I directed from 2019-2022. I have also worked extensively with the Library to showcase Trinity’s world-class collection of medieval manuscripts. In 2017/8, in partnership with the Long Room Hub and the Library I organised a series of public lectures on Trinity’s manuscripts entitled Beyond the Book of Kells. This has led to the discovery of some unnoticed treasures. I have also organised conferences on individual Trinity manuscripts, such as the Dublin Apocalypse (MS. 64), and been active in the Library’s Carnegie-Funded Manuscripts for Medieval Studies Project, which has so far seen the digitisation of forty manuscripts, including the famous Book of St Albans (MS. 177). I led the development of the new Trinity Centre for the Book in 2022, and am now its inaugural Director. I was elected a Fellow of Trinity in 2023. In the same year, I was also elected to the Board of the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England.

In Trinity, you’ll find me giving lectures on the various fresher medieval options and teaching sophister options on manuscripts, language contact, distant reading and translation.