Over its thousand-year-old afterlife, the Old English poem Beowulf has been read in manuscript, in analog and digital facsimiles, in printed and digital editions, in multispectral imaging, and in museum exhibitions; has been translated into prose and verse; has been adapted into nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century children's picture books, novels, and graphic novels; has been transformed into films and video games.

Using a variety of analogue and digital methods, this course studies Beowulf's afterlives both for the light they shed on the Old English poem and as a springboard into examining modern aesthetic and political engagement with the medieval past.