Leonard Neidorf (born ) is an American Philology who is Distinguished Professor of English language at Shenzhen University. Neidorf specializes in the study of Old English and Middle English literature, and is a known authority on Beowulf.
Biography
Raised in Voorhees Township, New Jersey, Neidorf graduated from Eastern Regional High School in 2006.
He gained a BA,
summa cum laude, in
English language from New York University in 2010, and a
PhD in English from Harvard University in 2014.
Upon gaining his PhD, Neidorf became a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows (2014-2016). Admittance to the Harvard Society of Fellows is considered one of the greatest academic achievements possible in the United States.
From 2016 to 2024, Neidorf was Professor of English at Nanjing University. He is currently Distinguished Professor of English at Shenzhen University.
He is an Associate Editor of
English Studies and the Editor-in-Chief of
The Explicator.
Research
Leonard Neidorf specializes in the study of Old English and Middle English literature. He is known as an authority on
Beowulf. Neidorf is the author of
The Art and Thought of the 'Beowulf'-Poet (2022) and
The Transmission of 'Beowulf': Language, Culture, and Scribal Behavior (2017).
Neidorf is the editor of
The Dating of 'Beowulf': A Reassessment (2014), which was awarded the Outstanding Academic Title by
Choice Reviews in 2015, and co-editor (with
Tom Shippey and Rafael J. Pascual) of
Old English Philology: Studies in Honour of R. D. Fulk (2016). Neidorf maintains that
Beowulf was probably composed by a single author in the late 7th or early 8th century AD.
For his research on
Beowulf, Neidorf was awarded the Beatrice White Prize from the English Association in 2020.
In addition to
Beowulf, Neidorf has published extensively on other major Old English poems, including
Widsith,
,
the
Finnesburg Fragment,
and
The Dream of the Rood.
His research addresses questions of authorship, interpretation, literary history, and textual criticism. In addition to his traditional philological research, Neidorf has published several large-scale quantitative studies of the corpus of Old English poetry.
Neidorf's studies of Beowulf situate the poem in a wide variety of contexts. He explicates its text in relation to Old Norse and Middle High German analogues,
Neidorf collaborated with eminent medievalist Tom Shippey on 'Beowulf': Translation and Commentary (2023), which presents the original text of Beowulf along with a facing-page translation, an extensive commentary, supplementary essays, and a substantial bibliography. In his review on the back cover, Francis Leneghan of the University of Oxford described the collaborative volume as "the perfect book for the first-time reader of Beowulf and essential reading for all scholars."
Selected works
-
The Dating of Beowulf: A Reassessment, 2014
-
Old English Philology: Studies in Honour of R.D. Fulk (with Rafael J. Pascual and Tom Shippey), 2016
-
The Transmission of Beowulf: Language, Culture, and Scribal Behavior, 2017
-
The Art and Thought of the Beowulf Poet, 2022
-
Beowulf: Translation and Commentary (with Tom Shippey), 2023
See also
External links
