Professor Paul Acker
Paul Acker is an Emeritus Professor of English at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri. He has taught Old and Middle English and Old Icelandic, as well as film and creative writing (poetry). He was born in Wethersfield, Connecticut and attended Tufts University (B.A. in English and Drama) and Brown University (M.A. in Creative Writing, Ph.D. in English).
Select publications
Books:
- Draco: A History of Dragons in the West (Harvard UP)
- Book Project for Clare Hall Visiting Fellowship: Icelandic Traditional Ballads
Articles:
- Revising Oral Theory: Formulaic Composition in Old English and Old Icelandic Verse (New York: Garland, 1998)
- Beowulf, translation of dragon section for The Penguin Book of Dragons (Penguin, 2021): 57-73
- “Tolkien’s Sellic Spell: A Beowulfian Fairy Tale,” Tolkien Studies 13 (2016): 31-44
- “Horror and the Maternal in Beowulf,” PMLA 121.3 (2006): 702-16
- The Index of Middle English Prose: Manuscripts in New York City Libraries (Cambridge, 2023)
- “A Very Animated Conversation on Icelandic Matters: The Saga Translations of William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon,” in The Routledge Companion to William Morris, ed. Florence Boos (NY: Routledge, 2020): 332-342
- “Love and Death in the Icelandic Ballad,” in New Directions in Medieval Scandinavian Studies, ed. Martin Chase (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 150-61
- The Saga of the People of Floi in The Complete Sagas of Icelanders (Reykjavík: Leifur Eiríksson, 1997), 3.271-330 [translation]
Select awards
- 2018 – Residency, NES Artists’ Colony, Skagaströnd, Iceland
- 2005 – NEH Seminar Grant, Yale University
- 2002 – Visiting Fellowship, All Souls College, Oxford University
- 1997 – NEH Seminar Grant, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University
