Profile
Biography
Ellie joined the department in 2018 as Associate Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics. She completed a PhD at the University of Nottingham and subsequently worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Universities of Nottingham and East Anglia. Her research focusses primarily on place-names as sources of information about language, society and landscape in the past.
Career
- Lecturer
University of York (2022-)
- Associate Lecturer
University of York (2018-2022)
- Senior Research Associate
University of East Anglia (2017-18)
- Research Fellow
Institute for Name-Studies, University of Nottingham (2014-17)
Departmental roles
- Admissions Tutor
- CITY College Subject Contact
Teaching
Undergraduate
I currently teach:
- Structure of English (stage 1)
- Middle English: Texts and Contexts (stages 2 and 3)
- English Place-Names across Time and Space (stage 3)
I also deliver a seminar on place-names on the interdisciplinary MA module, Vikings in Northumbria, delivered by the Centre for Medieval Studies.
Research
Overview
Current research
My primary research interest is in names as a source of evidence about language in medieval Britain. My expertise is in the medieval Germanic languages, Old and Middle English and Old Scandinavian, though I am also interested in interactions between these languages and other languages used in medieval Britain and Ireland.
My current research focusses on the vocabulary of medieval minor place-names in areas of intense Scandinavian influence, which I began working on for my doctorate. I have recently worked on medieval minor place-names from Leicestershire and Lincolnshire, the latter as part of a collaborative chapter on the intellectual and linguistic backgrounds to the Ormulum. I am currently working on a system of formalising criteria for toponymic loans from Scandinavian similar to that applied to lexical loanwords by Richard Dance and Sara Pons-Sanz.
Past research
From November 2017 to October 2018, I was place-names researcher on the project 'Lordship and landscape in East Anglia CE 400-800', a project investigating early medieval East Anglia. As researcher on the project, I investigated place-name evidence for early medieval settlement, infrastructure, land-use and power structures across East Anglia. The project’s findings have recently been published as an open-access monograph, Lordship and Landscape in East Anglia AD 400–800.
From November 2014 until October 2017, I was Research Fellow on 'Travel and Communication in Anglo-Saxon England', an interdisciplinary project investigating overland and riverine travel in Anglo-Saxon England using textual, archaeological, and place-name evidence. Combining archaeological and linguistic expertise, we were able both to identify previously unknown routes and to provide clearer definitions of their characteristics.
My doctoral research assessed the Scandinavian contribution to lexis used in late medieval place-naming. Through case-studies of areas with extensive evidence for Scandinavian language use during the Viking Age, I found that similar language-contact situations left very different traces in later dialects.
Collaborators
Stuart Brookes (University College London)
Brian Golding (retired; formerly University of Southampton)
Tom Williamson (retired; formerly University of East Anglia)
