Charlotte Brewer

Charlotte Brewer is a Fellow and Tutor in English at Hertford College. She began her academic career as a medievalist and has published many pieces on the fourteenth-century poem Piers Plowman. Much of this work is based on the study of a previously unidentified manuscript of the poem in the Bodleian Library. More recently, she has concentrated her research activities on the history and revision of the Oxford English Dictionary. Some of the nineteenth-century scholars who worked on the OED were also experts on the text of Piers Plowman.

Many of their letters and papers, along with later documents, are preserved in the archives of the Oxford University Press and the Bodleian Library. Dr Brewer has drawn on these resources to write a history of the OED since 1928 (the date the first edition was completed) called Treasure-House of the Language: the Living OED. This book reveals new information about the editing of the OED from the 1930s onwards, and shows how OUP's decision to digitalise the OED in the 1980s has enabled researchers to access information previously impossible to extract. Her website, Examining the OED, presents much of this research along with photos and documents from historical archives in OUP and elsewhere.

Supported by Oxford's John Fell fund and by a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship, she is now researching the history of selected political and sexual terms in Oxford dictionaries and the treatment of the eighteenth century, a period the OED originally neglected. New lexical findings from her research are feeding directly into the current revision of the OED.