Leonard Neidorf

Leonard Neidorf is Professor of English at Nanjing University, where he teaches courses on medieval literature and the history of the English language. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and his B.A., summa cum laude, from New York University. Before coming to Nanjing University, he was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Neidorf is the author of The Art and Thought of the Beowulf Poet (Cornell University Press, 2022) and The Transmission of Beowulf: Language, Culture, and Scribal Behavior (Cornell University Press, 2017). He is the editor of The Dating of Beowulf: A Reassessment (Boydell & Brewer, 2014), which was named an Outstanding Academic Title by CHOICE. He is the co-editor (with Rafael J. Pascual and Tom Shippey) of Old English Philology: Studies in Honour of R.D. Fulk (Boydell & Brewer, 2016) and the co-editor (with Yang Liu) of Epic and Romance: A Guide to Medieval European Literature (Nanjing University Press, 2021). Most recently, Neidorf collaborated with Tom Shippey on Beowulf: Translation and Commentary (Uppsala Books, 2023).

Neidorf is the author of more than 90 papers published in A&HCI journals. His articles have appeared in a wide range of prominent journals, including ELH, Folklore, Traditio, Review of English Studies, Modern Philology, Tolkien Studies, and Journal of Germanic Linguistics. His work in the digital humanities, published in Nature Human Behaviour, was profiled in The Guardian, The Times, and other news outlets. Neidorf has delivered invited lectures at numerous universities and has served as a keynote speaker at conferences in Australia, China, Germany, Korea, Norway, Poland, and Spain. Neidorf received a Jiangsu Province Excellent Course Award in 2018 for his course on medieval English literature. In recognition of his research on Beowulf, Neidorf received the Beatrice White Prize from the English Association for best publication in pre-modern literature. Since 2020, Neidorf has been an Associate Editor of English Studies (Taylor & Francis). Since 2024, Neidorf has been the Editor-in-Chief of The Explicator (Taylor & Francis).