Robert D. Fulk

R. D. Fulk is Class of 1964 Chancellor’s Professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he has taught since 1983. He has also taught at Wabash College (1982–1983) and the University of Copenhagen (1987–1988) and has held a visiting position various years at New York University. He is a philologist specializing in Germanic and Celtic languages and literatures, the history of the English language, and comparative Indo-European linguistics. His degrees are in English (B.A., Oakland University, 1973; M.A., University of Chicago, 1973; Ph.D., University of Iowa, 1982) and creative writing (M.F.A., Fiction, University of Iowa, 1976).

His most recent books include A History of Old English Literature (with Christopher M. Cain, revised edition, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), The Old English Canons of Theodore (with Stefan Jurasinski, Oxford UP, 2012), An Introduction to Middle English (Broadview Press, 2012), A Grammar of Old English, Volume 2: Morphology (with the late Richard M. Hogg, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), The Beowulf Manuscript: Complete Texts and The Fight at Finnsburg (Harvard UP, 2010), and Klaeber’s Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, fourth edition (with Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles, University of Toronto Press, 2008). He is also a contributing editor to Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages, in the most recent volume of which (2013) have appeared his editions of works by Haraldr hárfagri, Þjóðólfr ór Hvini, Þorbjörn hornklofi, Gunnhildr konungamóðir, Hákon góði, Eyvindr Finnsson skaldaspillir, Þorkell klyppr Þórðarson, and Sighvatr Þorðarson, as well as some anonymous compositions. In the past ten years his articles have appeared in Anglia: Zeitschrift für englische Philologie, Anglo-Saxon England, English Language and Linguistics, English Studies, Florilegium, Historische Sprachforschung, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Journal of Germanic Linguistics, Philological Quarterly, Review of English Studies, Studia Neophilologica, Studies in Philology, and Transactions of the Philological Society, among others, as well as in many edited collections. He serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Germanic Linguistics, Philological Quarterly, North-Western European Language Evolution: NOWELE, Interdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis, and the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library.

His current project, supported by his Guggenheim Fellowship, is A Comparative Grammar of the Early Germanic Languages. It is a historical and comparative examination of (chiefly) the Gothic, Old Norse, Old High German, Old Saxon, Old Frisian, and Old English languages, synthesizing what is known about their prehistory and early development, in relation to the reconstructed parent language, Proto-Germanic, from which they derive. The last complete grammar in English devoted to the topic was Eduard Prokosch’s Comparative Germanic Grammar (Linguistic Society of America, 1939).