Haruko Momma

Haruko Momma is a Japanese philologist and a scholar of Old English literature and language. She has published on Old English poetic composition in Beowulf, philology in the nineteenth century, and has taught Old English. She is currently a professor of English at New York University.^[1]

Momma held the position of Cameron Professor of Old English Language and Literature at the University of Toronto between 2017 and 2019.^[2] As part of that role she served as the chief editor of The Dictionary of Old English.^[2] She was elected a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America in 2025.^[3]

Momma was born in Japan and received her B.A. and M.A. in English from Hokkaido University.^[1] In 1983, she wrote her master's thesis on the composition of Beowulf, with supervision from Seizo Kasai.^[4] She moved to the University of Toronto in 1985 to begin her graduate studies under the supervision of Roberta Frank. While at Toronto, she was a research assistant at The Dictionary of Old English, which was then edited by Antonette diPaolo Healey and Ashley Crandell Amos. She received her Ph.D. in 1992.^[1]

Momma's research interests include Old English language and literature, philology and the philosophy of language, medieval culture, the culture of religion, and medievalism.^[1] Her first monograph, The Composition of Old English Poetry (1997), proposed an alternative to the syntactic laws of Hans Kuhn via a review of the entire corpus of Old English poetry.^[4] In her second monograph, Momma turned to English literature and language in the nineteenth century, focusing on how key philologists, including Max Müller and William Jones, shaped the study of the vernacular in Britain.^[5]

Momma gave a keynote at the second Race Before Race (#RaceB4Race) conference, hosted at the Arizona Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in January 2019.^[6]

Momma pronunció uno de los dos discursos de apertura en la conferencia «Recordando la Edad Media», organizada por el King's College de Londres y Notre Dame London Global Gateway en abril de 2018. En su discurso, titulado «¿Chico conoce a chica?: Pedagogía y el mundo de la literatura inglesa antigua», Momma «analizó las prácticas pedagógicas de la literatura inglesa antigua. Instó a los docentes a replantearse el canon de textos didácticos, a buscar tanto lo fácilmente accesible como lo inusual, y a cuestionar el uso continuado de las mismas selecciones que estaban disponibles en los libros de lectura de Thorpe y Sweet». ^{[ 7 ]}

• La composición de la poesía inglesa antigua (1997). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521030762.
• Con Michael Matto, A Companion to the History of the English Language (2008). Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 9781405129923.
• De la filología a los estudios ingleses: Lengua y cultura en el siglo XIX (2013). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521518864.
• Con Heide Estes. El inglés antiguo en todo el currículo: contextos y pedagogías , Estudios sobre la enseñanza medieval y renacentista 22.2 (2015).
• «Worm: Un enfoque léxico del manuscrito de Beowulf» (2016). En Filología del inglés antiguo: Estudios en honor de R. D. Fulk , editado por Leonard Neidorf , Rafael J. Pascual y Tom Shippey (Boydell & Brewer), págs.  200-214.
• Con Maren Clegg Hyer y Samantha Zacher (Eds.), Lexicología y lexicografía del inglés antiguo: Ensayos en honor de Antonette Dipaolo Healey (2020). Boydell & Brewer. ISBN 9781843845614.