Associate Professor Erin Sebo

Erin Sebo is Associate Professor of Early English Literature and Language at Flinders University, specialising in the history of emotions and early medieval cultural and intercultural attitudes. She is Lead CI on the ARC Discovery Project, The First English Speakers in Their Own Words, and CI on another ARC Discovery Project, Finding Friendship in Old English Literature. In 2025, she was Visiting Fellow at St Cross College, Oxford. Her first monograph, In Enigmate: the history of a riddle from 400-1500, exploring the influence of the African poet Symphosius on the early English literary tradition and specifically on early English understandings of the world, was published in 2018. Her forthcoming monograph on Beowulf is due out with Manchester University Press.  Erin has a considerable body of research finding innovative ways to use textual evidence to address interdisciplinary questions, especially in Archaeology. She led the first scientific survey of the Klavestene Ship-setting on the Danish island of Hjarnø and has collaborated on papers, including Parallels for cetacean trap feeding and tread‐water feeding in the historical record across two millennia (Marine Mammal Science), A double-edged sword: swords, bodies, and personhood in early medieval archaeology and literature (European Journal of Archaeology) and most recently, West African ancestry in seventh-century England: two individuals from Kent and Dorset (Antiquity) which offers the first genetic evidence for Sub-Saharan Africans living in seventh century England.