An English university has announced it will ” decolonize ” a master’s course in early medieval history by scrapping the term “Anglo-Saxon” and replacing it with “Early Medieval English.” The University of Nottingham’s Viking and Anglo-Saxon Studies program claims the term Anglo-Saxon is linked to “nationalist narratives,” including those who use it as a distinct form of English identity.
Staff at the university say they are concerned about beliefs that English identity is somehow distinct as an ethnic group. Additionally, the university says that in the future, it will tackle the use of “Viking”—an old Scandinavian term that loosely translates as pirate or raider.
The move by the University of Nottingham follows other erasures of English heritage in education. One of the UK’s most prestigious universities, the University of Cambridge, changed its materials to teach that Anglo-Saxons did not exist as a distinct ethnic group.
Since the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests and riots in both the United States and parts of Europe, there have been moves within various universities to “decolonize” subjects they deem as being “too white.” In one case, a University of Cambridge professor named Priyamvada Gopal took to X (formerly Twitter) in 2020 to state, “White Lives Don’t Matter,” and called to “abolish whiteness.”
The Indian-born Marxist academic later claimed that Britain’s World War II era Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, was a “racist,” taking part in a discussion of the legacy of his racial views.
In the United States, some academics have claimed universities are not woke enough, with one Florida academic announcing his resignation from the New College of Florida and threatening to burn it to the ground over conservative trustees appointing a new president last year.
