Professor Jane Roberts

Jane Roberts is Emeritus Professor of English Language and Medieval Literature at the University of London and honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of English Studies.

She is author of A Thesaurus of Old English with Christian Kay (1995; now on-line) and one of the four editors of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (2009). Other publications include The Guthlac Poems of the Exeter Book (1979) and A Guide to Scripts used in English Writings up to 1500 (2005; 2015).

She is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and of the English Association, an honorary fellow of St Hugh’s College Oxford, an honorary member of  Japan Medieval English Society;  an honorary senior research fellow in the English Language department of the University of Glasgow.

In 2022, Professor Roberts was elected as a member of the Royal Irish Academy.

A list of publications may be found at https://research.sas.ac.uk/search/fellow/163

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

• lexical semantics and history of the English language
• English medieval manuscripts
• Old and Middle English literature

Teaching

Mostly on medieval English vernacular manuscripts and history of the book.