Photo © Jooney Woodward

Leah Tether is a scholar of medieval French and English literature, Arthurian romance, book history and publishing studies. She completed her PhD in Medieval Literature at Durham in 2009 and then became a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Cultures of the Digital Economy Institute at Anglia Ruskin University. She has a background in trade publishing, having worked at Penguin Books. She took up the post of MA Course Director and Senior Lecturer in Publishing at Anglia Ruskin University in 2012, and then became a Principal Lecturer in 2014.

Leah joined the University of Bristol in 2015 as Senior Lecturer. She became Reader in 2017 and Professor in 2019. She served as the Graduate Education Director for the Faculty of Arts (Deputy Dean of Arts, Graduate Studies) from 2017 to 2021, and was the Co-Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies in 2017/18. From 2021, she was University Education Director (Quality) before being appointed as Head of the School of Humanities for 2022-24. Her current research looks at the publishing histories of vernacular medieval narratives from manuscript to digital. Her monographs include The Continuations of Chrétien's Perceval: Content and Continuation, Extension and Ending (D.S. Brewer, 2012), Publishing the Grail in Medieval and Renaissance France (D.S. Brewer, 2017), The General Reader and the Academy: Medieval French Literature and Penguin Classics (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and The Bristol Merlin: Revealing the Hidden Secrets of a Medieval Fragment (ARC Humanities Press, 2021). She is now working on a project, funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, exploring medieval literature that didn't make it to print in the early-modern period, with a monograph on the subject due for publication in 2025 with DeGruyter entitled Unpublished: Medieval Literature and the Early-Modern Publisher. 

Research supervision

Leah is able to supervise research postgraduates in the following areas: Arthurian Literature (French and English) with a focus on manuscript studies; digital humanities; history of the book; medieval and digital reading cultures; medieval French literature 1200-1400; publishing studies.

Teaching

Leah’s current undergraduate teaching covers medieval English and French medieval literature, trans-historical Arthurian literature, publishing and digital studies. At postgraduate level, she teaches on material and digital cultures of literature.

Current Affiliations

International Vice-President - International Courtly Literature Society

Fellow - Royal Historical Society

Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers

Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Associate Editor - Cambridge University Press series 'Elements in Publishing and Book Culture'

Contact

Office: 13 Woodland Road, 2.42

Email: leah.tether@bristol.ac.uk