Geoffrey Russom
Professor Emeritus of English
Office: 70 Brown St., Rm. 412
Phone: (401) 863-3275
Old English Tutorials
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Degrees
Ph.D. SUNY at Stony Brook, 1973
M.A. SUNY at Stony Brook, 1970
B.A. Stanford University, 1968
Research Interests
Old English, Middle English, Old Norse, and Old Irish literary cultures; linguistic theory; theory of poetic form; and the concept of 'barbarian' in imperialist writing.
Professional Accomplishments
Russom is the author of Old English
Meter and Linguistic Theory (1987) and Beowulf and Old Germanic Metre (1998).
In addition to work on English verse form, Russom has published articles on the
linguistic history of English, the multicultural backgrounds of Beowulf, and the
artistic excellence of preliterate verse traditions. He is best known for arguments
showing that rules of poetic meter are abstracted from
rules of ordinary language and operate like new linguistic rules.

