Departmental homepageOrietta Da Rold is Professor of Medieval Literature and Manuscript Studies, Fellow of St John’s College, and the Academic Director of The Cambridge University Library Research Institute (CULRI). Before coming to Cambridge, she was at Leicester and before that she covered research positions at Oxford, Birmingham and Leeds. She is a member of the Center for Material Texts and an affiliate member of Stanford Text Technologies and Cambridge Digital Humanities.
She teaches the medieval papers of the English Tripos and specialises in literature from 1100 to 1500, offering teaching for Part I: Paper 3 (early medieval literature and its contexts, 1066-1350); Paper 4 (English literature and its contexts, 1300–1550); for Part II: Paper 5 (Chaucer); Paper 6 (1066-1500); and for subject for special study: the medieval supernatural; Paper 3 (compulsory dissertation) and Paper 4 (optional dissertation). She has also offered supervisions on 'medieval tragedy' for Paper 2 (tragedy) and regularly teaches practical criticism and critical practice across Part I and II.
Her research focuses on the intersection between the study of medieval literature and texts c.1100-1500, Chaucer and the digital humanities. She is interested in studying manuscripts and materiality. She also works on editorial practices of medieval texts, codicology, paleography and scribal production techniques. More broadly, she is interested in social and cultural ideas of change as part of a wider holistic framework for the study of medieval literature.
