Alexandra Paddock

Dr Alexandra Paddock was awarded her DPhil by the University of Oxford in 2017. Before taking up her post as Assistant Senior Tutor and Lecturer in English at Middlebury-CMRS in August 2019, she was Lecturer in Medieval English at Keble College, University of Oxford (2015-2018), and Editorial Lead on the ‘LitHits’ project on digital reading at the Faculty of English, University of Oxford (2017-2019).

Alexandra specialises in English literature and the natural world, with an emphasis on whales in imaginative medieval writing.  She examines the ways in which animals constitute and even behave as the natural spaces in literary depictions, such as the island-turned-whale of the Exeter Book Physiologus. This literary phenomenon is the topic of her current monograph, Beastly Matter: Geomorphic Animals and Literary Description. She is also interested in how the medieval bestiary and Physiologus tradition is used by medieval writers, and was an invited speaker at the ‘Ark After Noah’ symposium at UCLA and the J. Paul Getty Museum. She is currently writing a chapter on bestiary worms, badgers, and other earth-moving creatures, for Earth, ed. Hugh Magennis, Marilina Cesario and Elisa Ramazzina (forthcoming, Brill).