Hope Doherty-Harrison

Dr Hope Doherty-Harrison (she/her) works on medieval iconography and literature in Middle English and Latin. After studying for a BA and MPhil at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, Hope obtained her PhD from Durham University in 2022, funded by a Durham Doctoral Studentship, with a thesis entitled ‘The Virgin Mary Between Ecclesia and Synagoga: Typology, Sin and Anti-Judaism in Medieval English Literature, c. 1200-1500’. Hope is currently a Teaching Fellow in Medieval History of Art at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh.

Key research and teaching interests include:

• Medieval Christian constructions of stigma, particularly regarding anti-Judaism, mental illness, and gender
• Biblical interpretation and retelling
• Typological associations and oppositions
• Dialogues between Latin and Middle English literature
• The often unpredictable relationship between iconographic compositions and textual sources.

Current and notable research projects/ publications:

• Hope’s research has included an article on three understudied versions of a Marian miracle tale, entitled ‘Supersessionist Time and the Turn of Synagoga in the Northern Homily Cycle and Rawlinson Versions of the Theophilus Legend’.
• A forthcoming peer-reviewed book chapter on the figure of Judas, gender, and the Song of Songs in a thirteenth-century English poem
• Hope is currently preparing a book on anti-Judaism in medieval English romance.
• Hope is also working with a collection of fifteenth-century manuscripts from Erfurt, Germany, held in the Centre for Research Collections, to investigate the contexts both of their original compilation and of their acquisition by the library in Edinburgh in the 1840s.
• Hope is also interested in the fourteenth-century dream-poem The Vision of Piers Plowman, and has published reviews of books authored by Piers Plowman scholars Emily Steiner and Arvind Thomas.