I am a Senior Lecturer in Medieval English Literature at Swansea University, where I teach modules on medieval literature and culture, gender studies, and transhistorical modules about literature, gender and the body.
My research is primarily about the religious women of the Middle Ages, the medicalization of spirituality, the physiology of spiritual rapture, the senses, emotions, medieval medicine, and the medical humanities. My first book, 'Margery Kempe's Spiritual Medicine: Suffering, Transformation and the Life-Course' was published in 2020 and released in paperback in 2023. I have co-edited a critical companion to Margery Kempe, 'Encountering The Book of Margery Kempe', which is also out in paperback. My interests lie in the deep intersections between the religious and medical ideologies of the Middle Ages and the parallels that can be drawn between the medieval and modern in terms of approaches to health and wellbeing. I am especially interested in medieval female visionaries and the way in which their physiology is 'written', 'read', and adapted.
My next book-length project is about the 'holy medicine' of medieval female mystics in Europe. This research will explore the ways in which medieval religious women were able to modify their physiology and utilise their senses in order to achieve spiritual enlightenment and transformation.
I am co-founder of The Margery Kempe Society and have contributed to The Guardian, BBC History Magazine, and have been featured in BBC Radio Wales' programme 'The Idea'.
Fellow of the Royal Historical Society