After visiting a few colleges, I felt Emma
was the one in which I felt most welcome
Dr Ingrid Ivarsen
BA (Oslo) PhD (St Andrews)
Research Fellow
Biography
I studied English language for my undergraduate degree at the University of Oslo. An Erasmus exchange took me to the University of St Andrews and its medieval history programme. I returned to St Andrews for a master’s degree in medieval studies, and, after a few years of working as a translator, I returned again for a PhD in medieval legal history.
Research
I work on medieval law. My research so far has focused on the laws issued in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms between c. 600 and 1020, and in particular the relationship between the text of the laws and the process that produced them. For my PhD, I sought to clarify some of the circumstances of their production by looking at the texts’ linguistic conventions, prefaces, use of sources, manuscript transmission and more.
My current research concerns the European context of Anglo-Saxon written law. To understand where the laws written in England in the early Middle Ages fit within the broader legal culture of western Europe at the time, I investigate instances of direct influence from other legal traditions, similarities and differences in legislative development and the transmission of legal texts to and from England. I am interested in the extent to which Anglo-Saxon laws were shaped in content and in form by legal knowledge gained from other places and traditions and the extent to which they were shaped by domestic traditions and developments.
Spotlights
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Dr Tobias Wauer
It’s 8pm and I’m about to start a 12-hour shift at the national COVID-19 testing centre in Milton Keynes. Truckloads of boxes with transparent plastic bags just arrived and a brief announcement is made: 15,000 patient swabs. For now, the mood among the team is cheerful and enthusiastic, but I know it will have morphed into exhaustion and fatigue by the end of the night.