Eleanor Parker and the Social Media Scholar

No one can deny that the landscape of academia has changed drastically over the last several decades. The rise of the internet has made previously cloistered fields far more accessible, opening spaces once reserved for a small academic elite. Blogs, social media, and digital archives have allowed scholars to reach audiences far beyond academic journals and student bases, reshaping both how knowledge is shared and who gets to engage with it. 

Eleanor Parker is the perfect example of this ‘new generation’ of academics. While in her undergraduate years at Oxford (she is now a lecturer there), she began a blog called Clerk of Oxford, where she wrote about her studies in medieval history with a particular focus on the notoriously insulated field of early medieval British literature. Launched in 2008, Parker’s blog quickly became one of the first academic platforms to leverage social media in a meaningful way, with her then Twitter presence gaining notability in the early 2010s and helping the blog reach a wider audience. While the blog has had no new posts in several years (the archives are still up), it has done wonders in expanding access to medieval history for learners who might not otherwise study the period.

This broader impact was brought into sharper focus here at St Andrews on 25 March, when Dr Christine Rauer, a professor of medieval literature, organised an event featuring Parker. At the event, Rauer introduced Parker first by mentioning her blog and presence on X, highlighting the significance of her digital outreach alongside her more traditional academic achievements. Parker’s social media handle was also the first item on a handout distributed at the event, a small but telling detail that underscored how seriously such platforms are now being taken within scholarly spaces. This attention on Parker’s social media symbolises a broader shift in academia, where public engagement is increasingly recognised as a valuable complement to traditional scholarship.

I am, in many ways, a product of the kind of academic outreach Parker represents. I first discovered Parker through her profile on X back in 2022, when I was seventeen, living in semi-rural Colorado. The academic world she inhabited seemed so very different from my own, and her descriptions of old religious festivals and obsolete traditions utterly enchanted me. I credit Parker’s blog as one of the reasons I decided to study medieval history at St Andrews, and I feel her influence on my life demonstrates just how powerful this new academic landscape can be when it is used thoughtfully.

However, there are those who remain against the use of technology in academic spaces, viewing social media as a threat to the credibility of traditional scholarship and an unserious pastime. Parker wrote about this struggle in 2014: “Career-wise [the blog] may do me more harm than good; I sometimes imagine sceptical 'real academics' stumbling across my blog, silently judging me […] To many of the people who have power over my career, blogging doesn't count as a worthwhile activity, even as a form of outreach or impact.” 

While critiques of social media in academia are understandable, particularly in disciplines like medieval studies where complex ideas can easily be oversimplified when translated for a wider audience, dismissing these tools entirely risks missing their transformative potential. As Parker’s work illustrates, digital tools (when used with care) can challenge the insularity of traditional academia, revealing a future in which scholarship is defined not only by discovery, but by the connections it creates.

While debates over the role of digital platforms in serious scholarship will continue (and rightly so), Parker makes clear all of the benefits of this new frontier of academia. As one of the first scholars to use social media to share rigorous medieval studies with a wider audience, she demonstrates that specialised fields can be made accessible without sacrificing depth — and I, for one, hope that more scholars will follow her example. 

Illustration by Sandra Palazuelos Garcia