Renée R. Trilling is an Associate Professor of English and Medieval Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She earned her MA and PhD in English from the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of The Aesthetics of Nostalgia: Historical Representation in Old English Verse, which won an award for best first monograph from the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England, and Old English Literature and Critical Theory, which is part of the Oxford Bibliographies collection. She is also the coeditor of A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Studies and the Old English editor of the Journal of English and Germanic Philology.

Renée’s research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, and the Center for Advanced Study. She has published articles on Beowulf, Wulfstan the homilist, Ælfric’s hagiography, vernacular historiography, and early medieval medicine, focusing on issues of gender, materiality, nostalgia, and literary form. Additionally, she has undertaken work that draws on trends in neuroscience and related fields to explore the role of materiality in early medieval notions of subjectivity.