Monika Opalińska, associate professor of historical linguistics at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw; her scholarly interests range from historical phonology of Germanic languages and historical metrics to the history of the English language and literature, and manuscript studies.
She has edited and translated Old English poetry into Polish – The Dream of the Rood, the Exeter Book elegies, versified prayers (Sen o Krzyżu. Staroangielski poemat mistyczny, WUW 2007, 2013, second ed.; Pieśni Szarej Godziny. Elegie staroangielskie z Kodeksu z Exeter, WUW 2014). She is the author of To the Rhythm of Poetry. A Study of Late Old English Metrical Prayers (WUW 2014) in which she analysed alliterative prayers and their manuscript witnesses from the 10th and 11th centuries. Her current work in progress traces the multiform translations and paraphrases of the Pater Noster into Old and Middle English verse in manuscripts dated between the 10th and the 15th century (e.g. ‘The canon and variants – boundaries and internal variation in the corpus of Middle English Pater noster versifications’. In: J. A. Lapin and S. Pink (eds.). Dark Archives: Voyages into the Medieval Unread and Unreadable, Vol. I. Graphosphere – Medium Aevum Monographs. The Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature. Oxford, Dark Archives; cf. also: Pater noster).
From 2021, she has been engaged in a collaborative project which involves a reconstruction of an 11th-century English psalter (the so-called N-Psalter) and analyses of manuscript fragments from this codex: The N-Psalter). This project combines traditional philological methodology and physical and chemical analyses applied to manuscript sources.