About the Study Leader 

Sarah Anderson, Senior Lecturer in English and Medieval Studies

Having received her Ph.D. in Medieval Studies from Cornell University, Sarah M. Anderson was a research fellow at The Arnamagnæan Institute at the University of Copenhagen for six years, where she worked on a critical edition of three Old Icelandic legendary sagas. Since 1997, Anderson has taught in the Department of English, Medieval Studies Program, and Freshman Seminar Program at Princeton University, offering courses on Old English, book history, Arthuriana, and medieval travel literature.  Anderson contributes to several initiatives at Princeton as a mentor, developing cross-disciplinary and collaborative courses.

Her publications include Cold Counsel, a co-edited volume of essays on Old Norse literature (2001); the introduction and notes to the Longman’s Cultural Edition of Beowulf (2004); and invited essays on the topics of empire and old age.  Anderson’s essay, “Studies in Medieval Star-Gazing” (Arthuriana, 12/2020), previews a developing project on medieval maps as material and imaginative renderings of space, identity, and cultural transaction.  For Animalia: Animal and Human Interaction in the Early Medieval English World (2025), Anderson wrote a chapter called “Unwitting Oxen: Visual Language and Verbal Play in Four Old English Riddles” that takes on the complex relations among quite literal oxen, wild cattle, and the people with whom the creatures interacted, as well as the metaphorical analogy between domesticated animals and enslaved persons in a group of Old English riddles from the Exeter Book.

Currently, Anderson is focusing on a well-known Icelandic-made manuscript of about 1500-1525 CE (AM 152 fol.).  This manuscript is a storehouse of eleven Icelandic “family sagas”, mythical-heroic sagas, and sagas of chivalry.  The codex presents problems of how to reconstruct this particular assembly, but also of the manuscript’s social history, from its design through its later uses.  In addition to an introduction to book history, “Touching Books”, Anderson is developing a course on the literature of fear for 2027.

In July 2018, Anderson was the study leader on a National Geographic-Lindblad Expeditions program for Princeton Journeys in which we circumnavigated Iceland.  For Princeton Journey’s August 2026 itinerary from Iceland to Ireland, Anderson is eager to take the seaward route to understanding the unique cultures of the North Atlantic with you.