Dr Hope Doherty-Harrison

Job title:

Leverhulme Early Career Fellow

edohert2@ed.ac.uk

Office:

O.54, Hunter Building

Biography

Dr Hope Doherty-Harrison works on medieval literature and iconography. Hope’s primary 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; and the often unpredictable relationship between iconographic compositions and textual sources.

Hope’s first monograph is Love and anti-Judaism in medieval English romance: Typologies of violence and desire (Manchester University Press, 2025). Hope's second monograph project, provisionally entitled The Living Judas in Medieval Text and Image, is the focus of her Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship and is under contract with Cornell University Press.

After growing up in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, Hope studied for her BA and MPhil at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, where she was awarded the Margot Heinemann Prize for Shakespeare in 2016, and the Christopher MacGregor Memorial Award for English Literature in 2018.

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 worked as a Teaching Fellow in Medieval History of Art at Edinburgh College of Art from 2022-24, during which she wrote the manuscript for Love and anti-Judaism in medieval English romance. She returned to the department to take up her Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in 2025.

Research interests

Medieval literature and iconography
Manuscript studies
Jewish-Christian relations
Romance and chivalric culture
Biblical interpretation

Teaching

Hope has contributed research-led teaching across a range of History of Art courses from pre-Honours to PGT level. Based on these experiences, she is working on a pedagogical essay entitled ‘Teaching with Synagoga’.

Together with Dr Aaron Allen and Dr Bryony Coombs, Hope was awarded a grant through the Principal's Teaching Awards Scheme (PTAS) in 2025 for the design and delivery of 'Experiencing the Past: Interdisciplinary Experiential Learning through Heritage-Based Workshops'.

Research

Select Publications

Love and anti-Judaism in medieval English romance: Typologies of violence and desire (Manchester University Press, 2025).
Towards an Accessible Academy: Perspectives from Disabled Medievalists, ed. Alexandra R. A. Lee, Hope Doherty-Harrison, and E. R. P. Champion (Medieval Institute Publications; De Gruyter, 2025).
‘Mary’s Daughter: Gender and Conversion in Titus and Vespasian’, New Medieval Literatures 26 (2026).
'Self-Injury and Truth in Hebrew and Latin Versions of the Seven Sages of Rome', Open Library of Humanities 11.2 (2025), 1-19.
‘Stories out of Order: Autism and Medieval Studies’ in Towards an Accessible Academy: Perspectives from Disabled Medievalists, pp. 125-49.
‘Love, the Holy Family, and the Song of Songs in the “Judas Ballad”’; in Emotions on the Fringes: Feelings of the Marginalised from Late Antique to Early Modern Literature, ed. Felix Lummer (Trivent Medieval, 2024), pp. 167-203.
‘Supersessionist Time and the Turn of Synagoga in the Northern Homily Cycle and Rawlinson Versions of the Theophilus Legend’, Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures 12.1 (2023), 88-122.

Fellowships held

Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship, University of Edinburgh, 2025 – 2028
Postdoctoral Fellowship, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Yale University, October 2024 – March 2025
Centre for Research Collections (CRC) Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), University of Edinburgh, April – September 2024