Rowan Wilson

I began my studies with a BA (2017-2020) in English Literature at Merton College, Oxford, going on to do an MSt in English 650-1550 as the Jeremy Griffiths History of the Book scholar for 2020-2021 at St Hilda's College, Oxford. I then spent a year as a Hanseatic Scholarship-funded visiting researcher at the University of Bonn. My DPhil, beginning in October 2022, will be supervised by Dr Annie Sutherland and funded jointly by the AHRC and the Clarendon Scholarship. My doctoral research - proposed title 'Hearts of Stone: Failures of Feeling in Late Medieval Devotional Culture' - focuses on medieval English and continental devotional texts in the context of the history of emotions. I explore what happens when devotees become aware that they aren't responding to devotional stimulus - depictions of Christ's suffering at the crucifixion, for example - with adequate affective, compassionate fervour. I'm looking for depictions of apathy, ambivalence, and emotional exhaustion in the literature of the period, and considering what impact a sense of affective isolation from Christian 'emotional communities' might have had on the individual. My wider research interests include: queer and trans medievalisms, posthuman medievalisms, memory in medieval cultures, medievalism in contemporary cultures, and depictions of the family in medieval literature.