I study the earliest English literature. Most of my work considers how literary form tells cultural and intellectual histories. My current research ranges from the multilingual literary cultures of early medieval England and beyond, to medieval ideas about affect and emotion, to fictionality and poetic narratives of history.

My first book, Forms of Devotion in Early English Poetry: The Poetics of Feeling (Cambridge University Press, 2023), offers a formal history of the complex conventions that reveal–but have also obscured–the importance of affective piety in early English devotional poetry. I’m also the author of Literary Form in Early Medieval England (Cambridge University Press, 2025), part of the Cambridge Elements series England in the Early Medieval World. I’m at work on a new monograph project, The Claims of Fiction in Early Medieval England, on the truth claims of the post-classical and proto-Romance fictions of pre-Conquest England. My work on the literary and intellectual cultures of the early medieval period has appeared in PMLA, Medium Ævum, Modern Philology, New Medieval Literatures, JEGP, and elsewhere.

I received my PhD from UC Berkeley, where I was supported by a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, after receiving my master’s from the University of Oxford. I currently teach medieval literature as an Associate Professor of English at William & Mary. I also serve as the chair of the Old English Forum Executive Committee at MLA, and as an editor for The Medieval Review.

You can get in touch with me at jalorden [at] wm.edu.