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 anonymity is conscious feature of medieval literature rather than reflective of a lack of authorial individualism. Marshall found that anonymity was a literary convention used by marginalised people, including women, to express dissent. 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.

In 2023, inspired by medieval works such as the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels that reflect where they are from, Marshall initiated a collaborative project with Otago Art Society to create a "Book of Otago". Community groups, schools, artists and writers were invited to submit a page for the book about what Otago means to them. The pages were exhibited at the Otago Art Society during November and December 2023, and will be bound into a published book.

Marshall practices and teaches calligraphy, to assist students in understanding the skills required to produce the manuscripts they are studying. Marshall teaches courses on monsters and monstrosity in medieval literature, medieval misogyny and those who fought against it, and also teaches a class in a surveying course, covering the Hereford Mappa Mundi.