Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors Michael Adams is Professor of English and Chair of the English Department at Albright College, in Reading, Pennsylvania. He is editor of Dictionaries and author of the forthcoming Slayer Slang. Buffy the Vampire Slayer and American English (Oxford University Press). He took his B.A. in Philosophy and his Ph.D. in English from the University of Michigan. His interest in historical lexicography originated in his work as a production assistant at the Middle English Dictionary. Norman Blake recently retired from the headship of the Department of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Sheffield (1973-1999) , after which he became a part-time research professor at De Montfort University (Leicester). He was director of the Canterbury Tales Project till his retirement and he has written widely on Chaucer and Caxton. Currently he is preparing a dictionary of Shakespeare's informal English. Margaret G. (Marace) Dareau worked for various periods from 1969 on the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue and was in charge of the editorial team which completed that dictionary in 2001. She has since worked for the Scottish National Dictionary Association until it was dissolved in March 2002. She is now Editorial Director of the new organization, Scottish Language Dictionaries Limited, which took over the functions of DOST and SNDA from April 2002. Philip Durkin is Principal Etymologist at the Oxford English Dictionary, where he leads a team of specialist lexicographers researching word histories as part of the comprehensive revision of the OED currently in progress. He trained as a medievalist at Oxford and has particular interests in the assimilation of loanwords within English and in semantic aspects of linguistic borrowing. Antonette diPaolo Healey is Editor of the Dictionary of Old English and Angus Cameron Professor of Old English Studies at the University of Toronto. She teaches in the Centre for Medieval Studies and the Department of English. William A. Kretzschmar, Jr. is a Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Georgia. He is editor, with Clive Upton, Notes on Contributors233 Rafal Konopka, and Ray Konopka, of the OxfordDictionary ofPronunaation for Current English (2001). He also served on the Advisory Board and was a Consulting Pronunciations Editor for the New Oxford American Dictionary (2001) . Robert E. Lewis is Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan and was Editor-in-Chief of the Middle English Dictionary. He is the author (with Angus Mcintosh) of A Descriptive Guide to the Manuscripts of the Prick of Conscience and (with Norman Blake and A. S. G. Edwards) Index of Printed Middle English Prose, as well as articles on Middle English language and lexicography, Chaucer and Middle English literature, and Medieval Latin and English manuscripts injournals such as Mediaeval Studies, Modern Philology, PMLA, and Studies in Philology. Frances McSparran was born and educated in Northern Ireland . She took an Honours degree in English at Queen's University, Belfast, a B.Litt, at St. Anne's College, Oxford, and completed her Ph.D. at Queen's University, Belfast, where she taught in the English Department before coming to the United States in 1968. At the University of Michigan, she held a joint appointment in the Department of English and the Middle English Dictionary until 1978, when she returned to full-time teaching in the English Department, from which she has recently retired. Since 1997, she has been Chief Editor of the Middle English Compendium, about which she writes in this issue. Jane Roberts is Emeritus Professor of English Language and Medieval Literature, King's College, University of London. Her publications reflect interests ranging from Old and Middle English language and literature to paleography, modern English lexicography, and the language of literature. She is one of the editors of the forthcoming Historical Thesaurus ofEnglish. John Simpson is Chief Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. He read English at the University of York and Medieval Studies at the University of Reading, after which he joined the staff of the OED under Dr. Robert Burchfield, working on the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary. He was co-editor (with Edmund Weiner) of the Second Edition of the OED (1989) and is now Chief Editor of the...