Adèle Kreager

Adèle Kreager is studying for a PhD in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Cambridge, where she also completed her undergraduate and MPhil degrees in the same subject. She works on identity and transformations (corporal and mental) in Old Norse literature. Her thesis project examines narratives which grapple with ideas of embodiment and permeability: human-animal shapeshifting, body-swapping, limb-loss and use of prosthetics, encounters with the (un)dead. What do these stories tell us about how the people creating and consuming these texts thought about the mental, physical and ontological boundaries of the ‘human’, and about how they considered the ‘human’ in relation to an agentive material world? This research draws on multiple scholarly frameworks (posthumanism, disability studies, new materialism), and builds on Adèle’s previous work on bodily fragmentation in Old Norse myth, and on the medieval supernatural at large. Adèle’s research interests span Old Norse, Old English, Middle English and Anglo-Norman literatures, and include the representations and narrative functions of landscapes; agency of objects; and cognitive and perceptual functions of riddles, kennings and other forms of linguistic play.