Simone Marshall

Simone Celine Marshall is a New Zealand academic, and is a full professor at the University of Otago, specialising in 15th century literature, in particular the afterlives of Chaucer's poems.

Academic career

Marshall has a Bachelor of Arts from Victoria University of Wellington, a BA with Honours and a Masters with Honours from the University of Waikato. She completed a PhD titled The female voice in the Assembly of ladies: a 'volume without contours' at the University of Sydney. Marshall then joined the faculty of the University of Otago, rising to associate professor in 2018 and full professor in 2022.

Marshall identified a previously unknown edition of Chaucer's works from 1807, and was invited to write a biography of Chaucer by Wiley/Blackwell. This discovery shows that Chaucer's life has been used to "uphold conservative white attitudes".

Marshall has received two Marsden grants. In 2009, the grant "A new paradigm of medieval literary anonymity" explored how she found that anonymity in medieval literature was a literary convention used by marginalised people, including women, to express dissent, rather than a reflection of a lack of authorial individualism. Marshall was an associate investigator on a 2011 Marsden grant "The machinery of transcendence: unattended moments in the Modernist tradition", which was led by Professor Chris Ackerley. This grant explored the relationship between medieval traditions and Modernist aesthetics.

Marshall practices and teaches calligraphy, to assist students in understanding the skills required to produce the manuscripts they are studying.

Selected works