Research Expertise and Interest

Medieval Studies, Old Norse literature, Viking and medieval Scandinavia, cultural memory, media theory

Research Description

Professor Heslop’s research centres on Old Norse textual culture, especially skaldic and eddic poetry, the sagas and the heroic tradition. She approaches this material from a medial perspective, and asks what ‘media theory’ we can detect– in an epoch before the mass media—in Old Norse texts and images. Relevant here is not only the media transition associated with the arrival of manuscript textuality, but also multi- and intermedial phenomena in images, inscriptions, and texts. A complementary area of current research interest, medieval Scandinavian representations and practices of commemoration and mourning, offers a site to think about religious mediation, the in-between space between the living and the dead, and the link between medium, memory and forgetting. 

See her CV.