Biography
Emma Hitchcock is a PhD candidate in the department of English and Comparative Literature. Her research attends to the early medieval North Atlantic archive. Her reading methods, informed by critical Indigenous studies, aim to contribute to our understanding of colonial structures and reparative possibilities.
Emma is currently (August 2022-July 2023) a Visiting Scholar at the Arctic University of Norway’s Center for Sámi Studies. In 2019, she was selected to participate in the FAB Musiconis initiative, a digital humanities collaboration between Columbia and Paris-Sorbonne University. She is also a member of the Disinventing Old English working group, a large-scale collaborative project of reimagining the way that early medieval English is conceptualized and taught in academic settings.
Emma is an instructor of record at Columbia University, where she has taught “Literary Texts, Critical Methods” (Columbia’s introduction to the English major) and “University Writing: Data and Society,” as well as TA-ed for ENGL4729 “The Canterbury Tales” (Spring 2020) and ENGL4901 “History of the English Language” (Fall 2019).
Before coming to Columbia, Emma earned a BA in Religious Studies from Yale University and then studied the neuroscience of pain and emotion with Tor Wager’s Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab for two years. Her work has appeared in Medieval Ecocriticisms, Old English Medievalism (Boydell & Brewer), The Oxford Handbook of Positive Emotion and Psychopathology, and The Nature of Emotion (Oxford).
