Professor Laura Ashe
David Woods Kemper Family Fellow & Tutor in English
Professor of English Literature
Education
BA MPhil PhD (Cambridge), MA (Oxford)
Professor Laura Ashe teaches medieval literature, covering the early medieval period with first years (650-1350), and the later Middle Ages (1350-1550) and Shakespeare with second years, together with all kinds of specialist medieval topics in second and third year options. She also co-teaches a cross-period course on ‘Tragedy’ from ancient Greece to the present day.
Undergraduate: Early Medieval Literature, 650-1350; Late Medieval Literature, 1350-1550; Shakespeare; comparative literatures 1000-1550; Tragedy, from Aeschylus to the present day.
Graduate teaching and research supervision: I offer options on the high middle ages and beyond for the MSt courses in Medieval Literature and Medieval Studies, and regularly supervise MSt dissertations in a great variety of fields.
I welcome prospective doctoral students wishing to work on any aspect of the Conquest and the post-Conquest period, broadly considered, and particularly on the multiple literatures of England; on the literatures of kingship, chivalry and aristocratic culture; on the rise of interiority and individuality in literature and culture; on the relation of Church and society; on Arthurian literature throughout the Middle Ages; on national and community identities, medieval imperialism and postcolonialism; on medieval romance, and questions of genre; on chroniclers and historiographies.
I am currently supervising four doctoral research students: on multilingualism and translation in the high middle ages; on heraldic and chivalric culture during the Hundred Years’ War; on trickster figures in romance, and on monstrous representations of Jews in late medieval England.
I work on literature, history, culture and ideas across the Middle Ages from the tenth to the sixteenth century, with a focus on England and its neighbours. I’m currently writing a monograph on Chaucer, developing new readings of his works that show his deep affinities with modern and current philosophies of subjectivity, recognition, and ethical agency.
My early research focused on the multilingual, French, Latin and English literary environment of post-Conquest England; Fiction and History in England, 1066-1200 (2007), examined ideologies of national identity and imperialism, the genres of romance and chronicle, and the first colonial discourses of the English in medieval Ireland. In 2015 I published Early Fiction in England: From Geoffrey of Monmouth to Chaucer, a Penguin Classics volume of high medieval texts in new translations and editions, intended both for students and the general reader. As an interdisciplinary historian I’ve contributed a volume to the Penguin Monarchs series, Richard II (2016), and in 2020 published Conquests in Eleventh-Century England: 1016, 1066, co-edited with Emily Ward of Cambridge. Other co-edited volumes include The Exploitations of Medieval Romance (2010), with Judith Weiss and Ivana Djordjevic; War and Literature (2014), with Ian Patterson; and Medieval and Early Modern Religious Cultures (2019), a festschrift for Vincent Gillespie, with Ralph Hanna.
My most significant work to date (supported by a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2009, a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2015, and the Morton Bloomfield Visiting Fellowship at the English Department of Harvard University in 2016), offered a new interpretation of the great changes of the high middle ages as a whole, in both religious and secular cultures: The Oxford English Literary History vol. 1. 1000-1350: Conquest and Transformation (Oxford University Press, 2017), now in paperback (2021).
Looking forward, I’m working towards a major project with a wider period purview, seeking to centre the European middle ages in a much broader literary history from the Greeks to the global present.
I am one of the editors of New Medieval Literatures: NML 23 (2023) was published in March, NML 24 is in production, and we’re accepting submissions for NML 25 and 26.