OEN: Old English Newsletter

OEN: Old English Newsletter is closed. We no longer accept articles or publish our annual bibliography or our Year’s Work in Old English Studies. Our archives are available on-line for free at oenewsletter.org. Any updates will be posted here.

Hundreds of people contributed to the flourishing of this journal during its fifty-nine years. (My extended acknowledgments and thanks are forthcoming.)

Why have we closed? Our host institution—the College of Humanities & Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts Amherst—cancelled all funding for journals around 2023, although vast amounts of money were spent elsewhere. No student help was available locally and volunteers from the field were scarce. The Five Colleges, of which UMass Amherst is a part, did not replace retiring medievalists, leaving the field of medieval studies sorely untended in rounds of local funding. The consequent, significant reduction in seminars, conferences, invited talks, courses, publications, and field-specific grants diminished our common reputation in administrative reckoning. We could no longer make a convincing case for local or national interest in “early medieval studies,” never mind Anglo-Saxon studies. The name “Anglo-Saxon” was anathematized by a handful of activist OE scholars who received international attention (coverage in the NYT and the Guardian, among others) and who added the field to the lists of proscribed perpetrators of systemic racism. Their drive to eradicate Anglo-Saxon studies, apparently integral to cleansing the Augean stables of Western racism, did nothing to help our circulation. A national decline in the humanities, massive reductions in government funding and a realignment of private funding aims, a drop of nearly 50% in undergraduate student majors in relevant faculties, and a shift to STEM training in colleges and universities gave OEN little chance of long-term survival. It is the great disappointment of my professional life that I am the editor who closed its doors.

Perhaps one day someone will revive the journal. Þæs ofereode, swa þisses mæg.

Stephen Harris
Amherst, MA