Nelson Goering (rhymes with herring) is a linguist and comparative philologist specializing in the phonology and morphology of the early Germanic languages. His particular interests include the prosody of early Germanic, the uses and limits of metrical texts as a source for linguistic information, the structure of medieval English, Norse, and Saxon alliterative verse, the transmission of metrical texts through scribal copying, and the interactions between morphological and phonological change. He also maintains a strong side interest in the life and works of J.R.R. Tolkien, including how his background as a philologist shaped both his fictional and scholarly writings. His monograph on Prosody in Medieval English and Norse was published in 2023, and is available as an open-access PDF from OUP.
Nelson grew up in the Ocooch ‘Mountains’ of southwestern Wisconsin, and completed an undergraduate degree in anthropology and linguistics in the middle of the cornfields at Grinnell College, Iowa. He moved to England in 2010, where he obtained a DPhil in comparative philology and general linguistics at the University of Oxford in 2016. In 2017, he began a British Academy funded postdoctoral fellowship, and in 2021 took up his current position as an FWO senior postdoctoral fellow at Ghent University, Belgium. He is married to Erika Graham-Goering.
