A graduate of the
University of California, Berkeley, where he received his higher degrees (BA in English, 1967; PhD in Comparative Literature, 1972), Niles taught for an initial four years as Assistant Professor of English at
Brandeis University. He then was invited to join the faculty of the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley, where he remained for 26 years until taking early retirement. In 2001, he joined the faculty of the
University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he taught for 10 years in the Department of English, was named the Frederic G. Cassidy Professor of Humanities, and was a Senior Fellow at the UW Institute for the Humanities. After his retirement from UW-Madison in 2011, he has remained active in research as Professor Emeritus at both UC Berkeley and UW-Madison. Niles is the author of nine books on Old English literature and related topics. He has edited or co-edited another eight books, in addition to upwards of sixty scholarly articles and other publications. His first book,
Beowulf: The Poem and Its Tradition (1983), ascribes the poem's strengths to its grounding in
Germanic heroic legend and the oral traditions of
alliterative verse cultivated in early medieval England. During the 1980s, he conducted fieldwork into singing and storytelling traditions in
Scotland, particularly among
Scottish Traveller groups, including the noted storyteller
Duncan Williamson. This research led first to his book
Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature (1997) which argues for
storytelling as a defining characteristic of the human species, and later to his book
Webspinner: Songs, Stories and Reflections of Duncan Williamson, Scottish Traveller (2022), a portrait of a single gifted tradition-bearer. In 2005, he taught a seminar at the
Newberry Library, Chicago, on the early history of Old English studies. This became the kernel of his 2015 book
The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066-1901, a sustained account of the evolution of the study of
Old English literature, the
Old English language, and the
Anglo-Saxons from the early Middle Ages to the death of Queen Victoria in 1901; and to his book
Old English Literature: A Guide to Criticism (2016), which carries the literary side of the investigation into the twenty-first century. His researches into the archaeology and prehistory of early Northwest Europe led to the jointly-authored publication
Beowulf and Lejre (2007), which centers on the prehistoric Danish site at the present-day hamlet of
Lejre, Zealand, where much of the imagined action of the Old English poem
Beowulf is set. Niles argues that the origins of the
Beowulf story can be traced to the topography and
legends associated with this monumental landscape. His 2019 book
God’s Exiles and English Verse: On the Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry is the first integrative book-length critical study of the earliest anthology of English-language poetry, the
Exeter Book, a late-tenth-century collection that includes such Old English poems as
The Wanderer and
The Seafarer. Niles argues for the structural and thematic coherence of this anthology as a product of the late-tenth-century
English Benedictine Reform. ''Klaeber's Beowulf
, 4th edition (2008), which Niles co-edited with Robert Fulk and Robert E. Bjork, has been called "a triumph for a triumverate." Medical Writings from Early Medieval England, Volume I'' (2023), co-edited with Maria A. D'Aronco, has been characterized as "nothing short of a monumental feat." In 2022, Niles was the honorand of a collection of articles, first published as a special issue of the journal
Humanities, and subsequently as the book
Old English Poetry and Its Legacy. ==Selected publications==