Liam Waters

Timothy Liam Waters is a PhD candidate in the Department of Scandinavian and Program in Medieval Studies at UC Berkeley. He received his BA in Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic from the University of Cambridge in 2017 and his MA in Scandinavian Studies from UC Berkeley in 2019.

During his time at Berkeley, Liam’s research and training has included medieval and ancient literature, medieval and modern languages, and a diverse array of literary theory. As an instructor, Liam has taught undergraduate courses on topics such as the representation of myth in modern media, Viking-Age travel literature, and Old Norse language.

His current research interests focus on the study of the fantastic in Old Norse literature, New Materialism, post-Humanism, and the construction of space in the mythological and legendary corpuses. His work on mythology and the materiality of the body is published in Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 18 (2022). His dissertation “Mythological Things: New Materialist Approaches to the Old Norse Myths” centers around these interests, particularly the ways in which imagined environments and material nuance our understanding of medieval mentalities.

In 2023, Liam was awarded the American-Scandinavian Foundation Fellowship to continue his research at the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies. He is currently based in Reykjavik, Iceland.