Roberta Frank

Roberta Frank (born 1941 in New York City) is a philologist specializing in Old English and Old Norse language and literature. She is the Marie Borroff Professor of English, with a courtesy appointment in Linguistics, at Yale University.

Frank received a B.A. in comparative literature from New York University (1962) and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard University (1968), with a doctoral dissertation on Wordplay in Old English Poetry. Frank taught at the University of Toronto beginning in 1968, from 1978 as a full professor and from 1995 as University Professor. At Toronto, she was involved with the Dictionary of Old English project and served as Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies (1994–99). In 2000, she joined the Department of English Language and Literature at Yale University, first as the Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of English and then, in 2008, as the Marie Borroff Professor of English. She is also a Senior Research Fellow at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. Frank was elected a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America in 1989, serving as the President of that Academy in 2006, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1995. She co-founded the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists in 1981 and served as its President (1986–88).

Frank was born in the Bronx. She is married to the medieval historian Walter Goffart.

Frank's research draws upon archaeological as well as literary and linguistic evidence to analyze aspects of early English and Scandinavian texts. Her work has focused upon the poetry of England and Scandinavia, including numerous publications on skaldic verse, the early North, and Beowulf.

• “Some Uses of Paronomasia in Old English Scriptural Verse” (1972)
• Co-editor, A Plan for the Dictionary of Old English (1973)
• Old Norse Court Poetry (1978)
• “The Beowulf Poet’s Sense of History” (1982)
• “Germanic Legend in Old English Literature” (1991)
• “The Search for the Anglo-Saxon Oral Poet” (1993)
• “Like a Bridge of Stones” (2011)
• “Siegfried and Arminius: Scenes from a Marriage” (2013)