English & joint degrees

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.

View all publications on the Faculty of English website

To date I have worked primarily on innovative and experimental prose fiction of the twentieth century. My research takes transnational modernism and book history as its major points of reference. My first book, The nouveau roman and Writing in Britain After Modernism (OUP, 2019), recovers the importance of the French nouveau roman to writers and publishers active in midcentury Britain as they debated what it meant to be ‘new’. In relation to this project, I have also published extensively on late modernist novelists who were active in Britain in the 1950s-70s, including Christine Brooke-Rose, Eva Figes, B. S. Johnson, Ann Quin, and Eva Tucker. My interests in the intersection in the twentieth century of French and British culture are also explored through work on the circulation of existentialism and its ideas in Anglophone contexts: published work in this line includes a book chapter on Doris Lessing and Jean-Paul Sartre, and a journal article on Dorothy Richardson and Gabriel Marcel.

I am currently beginning work on a new project that proposes to historicize contemporary platforms such as Amazon, Facebook, and Youtube through a comparison with the publishing industry of the twentieth century. This project takes on a variety of themes, such as the publishing industry and the emergence of the data industry, the development and regulation of supranational publishing markets, the literary oeuvre as appreciating asset, and literary labour and industrial relations in publishing. As scoping exercises for this project I ran an experimental book club about privacy and the data of digital literary reading, and I am working on an article that explores midcentury debates on whether the money earned from published literary works constitutes income earned from labour or from an asset.

I also maintain a long-term interest in the modernist writer Dorothy Richardson. My work on Richardson takes in scholarly publications, editorial work, and public engagement. I am a member of the editorial boards of Pilgrimages: The Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies, and of the Oxford Editions of Richardson’s fiction and letters, the first volume of which was published in 2020. I am the editor of the Oxford edition of Interim and Deadlock  – the fifth and sixth novels of Richardson’s novel-sequence Pilgrimage – which is due for publication in 2024.

I have taught in Oxford at both Faculty- and college-level for some years, working with college students on Prelims Paper 1 (Introduction to Literature), Paper 3 (Literature in English 1830–1910), and Paper 4 (Literature in English 1910–Present), as well as FHS Paper 5 (Literature in English, 1760–1830). I have convened and co-convened the Paper 6 Courses ‘Writers and the Cinema’, ‘The Avant-Garde’, and ‘Literature’s Silences’, as well as the MSt C-Courses ‘Fiction in Britain Since 1945: History, Time and Memory’, ‘Some Versions of Modernism’, ‘Political Reading’, and ‘Literature and the Platform’; I also convened the ‘Materials Texts’ strand of the MSt B-Courses. My own lectures series include ‘Some Versions of Modernism’ and ‘Theory in Context’; I regularly contribute to lecture circuses such as ‘Adventures in Form’ and ‘Black Letters Matter’. I have supervised numerous undergraduate and Master’s dissertations on a range of 19th-21st century writing, theory, and cinema, as well as acting as co-supervisor for doctoral theses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century topics.

I grew up in Kent, and after attending the local state grammar school I read English at Oxford, where I took my undergraduate and graduate degrees. I have taught at Oxford since 1999, and have also worked at the universities of Reading and Southampton.

I teach English literature from the early medieval period up to the sixteenth century. I also teach the history, theory and use of the English language.

My principal research interests are in Chaucer, the medieval and sixteenth-century love lyric, and poetics, with an emphasis on how form precedes and generates meaning. I am interested in interrogating the agendas which drive the taxonomy of poetic form, and in challenging the division still made between medieval and early modern literature.

I have recently completed a book on the role of rhyme in late medieval and early Renaissance love lyric. This book, Rhyme and the Construction of Love in English Lyric 1300-1579, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2023. It shows that decorum in the choice of vocabulary, combined with the limited rhyme resources of English, render certain clusters of words and ideas almost inevitable, particularly in complex poetic forms demanding large rhyme-groups. As a result, the essentially arbitrary element of rhyme comes to generate features of the experience of love in poetry, and the impression of subjectivity in love lyric is a side-effect of the necessities of rhyme.

I am currently working on a new book about anthologies of ‘English verse’ and the fantasies of England they project. This picks up my longstanding interests in poetry anthologies and the agendas which drive the critical framing of texts.

View all publications on the Faculty of English website

I joined Worcester in 2020, after studying at Oxford and Cambridge and holding a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Leeds. I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

I teach English Literature from 1550 to 1830 and literary theory, including the following papers:

• Literature in English, 1550-1660
• Literature in English, 1660-1760
• Literature in English, 1760-1830
• Elements of Criticism
• Shakespeare
• Epic
• Tragedy

My main research area is literature from the Restoration to the Romantic period. My research interests include: nature writing; ecocriticism; georgic and pastoral poetry; the long poem; time in literature; weather, climate, and climate change in literature and culture; genre, influence, reception, and allusion. My first book, Reading Time in the Long Poem: Milton, Thomson, and Wordsworth was published in 2022 with Edinburgh University Press. I also co-edited the collection Georgic Literature and the Environment: Working Land, Reworking Genre (Routledge 2022).