Staff Biographies
Gale Owen Crocker
Professor Gale Owen-Crocker
Gale R. Owen-Crocker, the Director of the Project, was Professor of Anglo-Saxon Culture at the University of Manchester until her retirement from the University in January 2015 and is now Professor Emerita.
She has written extensively on Old English literature and on medieval dress and textiles, especially The Bayeux Tapestry. Her books on cloth and clothing include Dress in Anglo-Saxon England: revised and enlarged edition (2004), King Harold II and the Bayeux Tapestry (2005), Medieval Textiles of the British Isles AD 450-1100: an Annotated Bibliography (with Elizabeth Coatsworth, 2007), The Bayeux Tapestry: Collected Papers (2012), Encyclopedia of Medieval Dress and Textiles of the British Isles c. 450-1450 (with Elizabeth Coatsworth and Maria Hayward (2012) and Medieval Dress and Textiles in Britain: A Multilingual Sourcebook (with Louise Sylvester and Mark Chambers 2014), the latter the product of a Leverhulme-sponsored Project (2009-2012) on medieval dress and textile vocabulary from unpublished sources, on which she was co-investigator with Dr Louise Sylvester. With Dr Elizabeth Coatsworth she has written electronic bibliographies on ‘Textiles’ (2012) and ‘Dress’ (2014) in Oxford Bibliographies Online: Medieval Studies.
With Robin Netherton she co-founded and co-edits a refereed journal: Medieval Clothing and Textiles. Volume 11 was published in 2015.
With Dr Maren Clegg Hyer she is collaborating on a series of books about Anglo-Saxon material culture. The first volume The Material Culture of Daily Living in the Anglo-Saxon World (2012, paperback 2013) contains chapters on Leather, including shoes (Cameron and Mould); Textiles (Clegg Hyer and Owen-Crocker); and Weapons and Armour (Owen-Crocker).
In ‘retirement’ she is continuing to lecture and to write. With Anna Henderson she is writing/editing Making Sense of the Bayeux Tapestry: Readings and Reworkings; with Dr Elizabeth Coatsworth, she is writing Medieval Garments; with Maggie Kneen, The Design of the Bayeux Tapestry; and with Professor Sarah Keefer, The Bayeux Tapestry and the Liturgy.
Contact Details :
Email: gale.owencrocker@ntlworld.com
Dr Mark Chambers
'Dr Mark Chambers is a Research Associate at the University of Durham, working on a 5-year collaborative, AHRC-funded project: Records of Early English Drama, North-East. He specialises in medieval and early modern drama as well as late-medieval language contact, and much of his research has focused on texts dealing with late-medieval clothing, fashion and sumptuary legislation.
In 2012-13 he was a Teaching Fellow at The University of Birmingham, having formerly been Research Consultant on the Lexis of Cloth and Clothing Project, based at the University of Westminster. From 2009-2012 he was employed as Research Associate on the Lexis project's sister work: the Medieval Dress and Textile Vocabulary in Unpublished Sources Project, in collaboration with Dr. Louise Sylvester and Professor Gale Owen-Crocker. This project resulted in a co-edited volume entitled Medieval Dress and Textiles in Britain: A Multilingual Sourcebook, published by Boydell.
Dr Chambers holds a PhD in English from Trinity College Dublin (IRE) and has lectured on medieval and Renaissance English language and literature at the University of Durham, Trinity College Dublin, University of Westminster and the University of Birmingham. He has published widely on material culture and historical lexicology and continues conducting research on fashion and sumptuary legislation in the 14th through the 16th centuries and on the lexis of medieval fashion and dress. He is currently conducting research into the surviving textual evidence of the Durham Corpus Christi procession, as well as preparing a monograph on materiality and violence in medieval drama.'
Dr Louise Sylvester
Dr Louise Sylvester is Reader in English Language at the University of Westminster, London, UK.
Louise works on the vocabulary of Middle English and is the author of Studies in the Lexical Field of Expectation (1994), co-author of Middle English Word Studies: A Word and Author Index (2000) and co-editor of Lexis and Texts in Early English: Studies Presented to Professor Jane A. Roberts (2001) as well as a number of articles and book chapters.
In November 2009 she became Director, with Professor Gale Owen-Crocker as Co-Investigator, of a three-year project, looking at Medieval Dress and textile vocabulary in unpublished sources. The postdoctoral research assistant for this project is Dr.Mark Chambers and the project is funded by the Levehulme Trust. This resulted in the book Medieval Dress and Textiles in Britain: A Multilingual Sourcebook.
She is currently Co-Investigator on the Leverhulme Trust-funded project A Bilingual Thesaurus.
Contact Details :
Email :
L.Sylvester1@westminster.ac.uk
Dr Pam Walker
Dr Pam Walker completed her PhD 'Fashioning Death: The choice and representation of female clothing on English Medieval funeral monuments' in 2012. She is now working as the Curator of the Clarks Shoe Museum and also teaches for the Open University.
