John Niles (scholar)
John D. Niles (born 1945) is an American scholar of medieval English literature best known for his work on "Beowulf" and the theory of oral literature. Career. A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his higher degrees (B.A. in English, 1967; PhD in Comparative Literature, 1972), Niles taught for an initial four years as Assistant Professor of English at Brandeis University. He then was invited to join the faculty of the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley, where he remained for twenty-six years until taking early retirement. In 2001  he joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he taught for ten years in the Department of English, was named the Frederic G. Cassidy Professor of Humanities, and was a Senior Fellow at the UW Institute for the Humanities. After his retirement from UW-Madison in 2011 he has remained active in research as Professor Emeritus at both UC Berkeley and UW-Madison. Niles is the author of eight books on Old English literature and related topics. He has edited or co-edited another nine books, in addition to upwards of sixty scholarly articles and other publications . During the 1980s he conducted extensive fieldwork into singing and storytelling traditions in Scotland, particularly among Scottish Gypsy and Traveller Groups, including the noted storyteller Duncan Williamson. This research resulted in his 1997 book "Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature". In 2005 he taught a seminar at the Newberry Library, Chicago on the early history of Old English studies. This became the kernel of his 2015 book "The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066-1901", a sustained account of the history of Anglo-Saxon studies. His researches into the archaeology and prehistory of early Northwest Europe led  to the joint publication "Beowulf and Lejre" (2007). This features a mine of information about the prehistoric Danish site (at the present-day hamlet of Lejre, Zealand) where much of the imagined action of "Beowulf" is set. His 2019 book "God’s Exiles and English Verse: On the Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry" is the first integrative book-length critical study of the earliest anthology of English-language poetry, a late-tenth-century collection that includes such poems as "The Wanderer" and "The Seafarer".