Bjork, Robert E., 1949-....

Robert E. Bjork (1949-) was born in Virginia, Minnesota, and attended Pomona College in Claremont, California, Stockholm University, and University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). He became Director or the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) in 1994 and he has been a Professor of English at ASU since 1983. His published work included four books on Old English Poetry and translations of seven modern Swedish novels. In 1998 he was appointed General Editor of The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages, scheduled for publication in 2006-2007, and he is a contributor to the 4th edition of Frederik Klaeber’s Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg, to a history of Scandinavian scholarship on Anglo-Saxon literature, and is working on a facing-page translation of poems of Cynewulf. He serves on the Council of the Medieval Academy of America, is past President of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 2004-2005. In 1987 he won the translation prize of the American-Scandinavian Foundation and in 1989 he won honorable mention for both a translation prize from the Translation Center, Columbia University, and the John Nicholas Brown Prize of the Medieval Academy of America.

Noted translator, professor and Director of Graduate Studies in English at Arizona State University.