About

Amanda Hopkins is a medievalist, with particular interest in the romance genre, especially Breton Lais and their dissemination in Europe, and in lycanthropy and other kinds of shape-shifting. She has also published on sexuality and disability. She read for a B. A. in English and European Literature at Warwick, and did postgraduate study in Medieval Studies at the University of Bristol. She has been teaching at the University of Warwick since 2002 for the the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, and since 2003 for the Department of French. She has also taught academic writing for the Academic Writing Programme and the Department of French, and is now a Teaching Fellow in the School of Modern Languages, and acts as Academic Lead for Study Skills as well as teaching content modules.

Research interests

Breton Lays: The Breton lay in Old French, Middle English and Old Norse: genre, origins and development, sources and analogues, authorship; relationship to other short narratives and framed and unframed narrative collections; characteristic themes and stock elements; memory and the role of commemoration; the role of minor characters; generic self-consciousness.

Sexuality and the Erotic: Depictions of sexual activity; sexuality and gender; appropriation of neutral texts by misogynous authors; treatments of gender and sexuality in romance texts: narrative depictions of marital and extramarital sexual activity, masturbation and sexual fantasy, violation and violence; sexual economy; relation of clothing and nakedness to the erotic.

Comparative Literature/sources and analogues of Middle English literature: Comparison of Middle English texts with Old French, Italian, Latin, Welsh and Old Norse sources and analogues; influences of culture and society.

Disability: Disability, mutilation and self-mutilation in medieval literary texts and medieval English law, and the relation between the two. Insanity and performance of madness.

Animals: The treatment of animals in romance and bestiary; werewolves from Ancient Greece to Hollywood.

Translation: Medieval and modern methods.

Teaching and supervision

Lecture handouts and other downloads can be found using the navigation bar above. There are also other materials, including pages dedicated to modules I teach and to academic writing practice, on the student pages of my personal website (www.amandahopkins.co.uk). Feedback on materials and suggestions for improvement, new topics or useful links/texts are always welcome.

Other teaching/supervision at Warwick:

Final-year undergraduate dissertation projects (English and Comparative Literary Studies):

• 'Fairy Tales in Modern Feminism: The Function of Feminist Retellings of Traditional Contes de fées' (2017–18)
• 'Performing Identity: Bawdy Women from The Wife of Bath to Jo Brand' (2017–18)
• 'Rethinking the Canon: An Exploration of Working Women’s Poetry and Writing of the Great War' (2016–17)
• 'The Female Enigma: The Representation of Women in Medieval Arthurian Literature' (2016–17)

• 'The Coming of Age of Red Riding Hood: A Return to Sex and Violence' (2015–16)

Co-supervision of MA dissertation (Department of French)

• 'Human/Animal Identity in the Medieval Bestiary' (2014–15)

• The Epic Tradition (2002/03–2015/16)
• Medieval to Renaissance English Literature (2002/3–2019/20)
• Approaches to Reading in English and French (2003/4–2018/19)
• Modern French Thinkers (2005/6–2019/20)
• Literatures of the Great War (2014/15–2019/20)

• Modules, lectures and classes for English and Comparative Literary Studies, for Computer Science (undergraduate and MSc), for Physics (undergraduate), for Business Studies (early-career researchers), for Engineering (MSc at WMG)

Selected publications

Melion and Biclarel: Two Old French Werwolf Lays, ed. and trans. by Amanda Hopkins. Liverpool Online Series, Critical Editions of French Texts 10 (2005), online: <https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/media/livacuk/modern-languages-and-cultures/liverpoolonline/Werwolf.pdf>

Sexual Culture in the Literature of Medieval Britain, ed. by Amanda Hopkins, Robert Allen Rouse and Cory James Rushton. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer (2014)

The Erotic in the Literature of Medieval Britain, ed. by Amanda Hopkins and Cory Rushton. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer (2007)

Full list of publications at <http://amandahopkins.co.uk/biography.htm>

Professional associations

Member of the International Arthurian Society; British Branch Bibliographer, 2008–13; British Branch Committee member, 2003—13 (ex officio from 2008)

Member of the International Courtly Literature Society; British Branch Bibliographical Coordinator, 2004–06

Qualifications