Dr Hope Doherty-Harrison
Job title:
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, History of Art
Office:
O.15, Hunter Building
Biography
Dr Hope Doherty-Harrison works on medieval literature (Middle English and Latin) 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, Love and anti-Judaism in Medieval English romance: Typologies of violence and desire, is under contract with Manchester University Press.
Hope studied for her BA and MPhil at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, winning the Margot Heinemann Prize for a Shakespeare examination 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’. From August 2022 until September 2024, Hope was a Teaching Fellow in Medieval History of Art at Edinburgh College of Art, during which she wrote the manuscript for Love and anti-Judaism in Medieval English romance. In 2024, Hope’s six-month Centre for Research Collections (CRC) Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) supported her research on a twelfth-century text in a fifteenth-century manuscript in the Edinburgh collections, Ekbert of Schönau’s Stimulus amoris in Edinburgh MS 113, and the acquisition of the distinctive group of fifteenth-century manuscripts from Erfurt by the University of Edinburgh, among which MS 113 belongs.
Hope’s new research focuses on medieval depictions of Judas, and is supported by a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Yale University in London, from October 2024 to March 2025, and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in History of Art, University of Edinburgh, from April 2025.
Hope’s research focuses on perceptions of Judaism in medieval Christian sources, and she is interested in medieval Jewish-Christian relations more broadly. She is also interested in themes of love, sexuality, marriage and gender in these contexts. Her first book, Love and anti-Judaism in Medieval English romance, proposes that the personification of Synagoga in medieval Christianity, and the biblical interpretations from which this personification was developed, had a significant impact on portrayals of marriage, love, and sexual violence in Middle English romance. She has also published work on the personification of Synagoga in the legend of Theophilus (‘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, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Spring 2023), 88-122) and in a poem known as the ‘Judas ballad’ (‘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 (Budapest: Trivent Medieval, 2024), pp. 167-203).
Hope’s Leverhulme-funded book project, tentatively entitled Gendering Judas in Medieval Art and Text, focuses on medieval depictions of Judas across art and literature from the early to late Middle Ages. Proposing that Judas is a key and transitional figure in the founding of Christianity, this research investigates portrayals of Judas that deal with betrayal, mental illness, and ideas of sacrifice and love, particularly where such themes appear to be gendered. The project will investigate intersections between the personae of Judas and Synagoga, and possibly uncover new perspectives on portrayals of Christ as well. This research compares sources that have not traditionally been studied together, such as later-medieval legends that depict Judas as a type of Oedipus, and early-medieval stone sculpture, where Judas can be involved in their visual structures of biblical typology.
Hope is also interested in intersections between medieval studies, disability studies, and teaching practice. Together with Alexandra R. A. Lee and E. R. P. Champion, she is co-editor of the forthcoming volume, Towards an Accessible Academy: Perspectives from Disabled Medievalists (Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University Press), and together with Sophie Sexon, Hope has contributed a chapter for Critical Neurodiversity Studies: Divergent Textualities in Literature and Culture, ed. Louise Creechan, Anna Stenning, and Jenny Bergenmar (Bloomsbury, 2025). She is also currently working on a pedagogical essay called ‘Teaching with Synagoga’.
Hope welcomes all enquiries about her research and teaching.
