Dr Hope Doherty-Harrison
Job title:
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, History of Art
Office:
O.54 (Higgitt Gallery), 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, Love and anti-Judaism in medieval English romance: Typologies of violence and desire, will be published by Manchester University Press in September 2025. Hope's second monograph project, When Judas Is Alive: Engendering the Supersession in Medieval Text and Image, is the focus of her Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. This project was also 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.
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’. 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 the spring and summer of 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. This project also investigated the acquisition of the distinctive group of fifteenth-century manuscripts from Erfurt by the University of Edinburgh, among which MS 113 belongs. While working at IASH, Hope was awarded fellowships from the Paul Mellon Centre and the Leverhulme Trust to support her new project on medieval portrayals of Judas.
For the design and delivery of a new pedagogical project, Hope was awarded a grant of £2500 through the Principal's Teaching Awards Scheme (PTAS), along with Dr Aaron Allen and Dr Bryony Coombs, entitled 'Experiencing the Past: Interdisciplinary Experiential Learning through Heritage-Based Workshops'. The workshops will take place at the 1722 Waggonway Heritage Centre, Mary King's Close, and the Centre for Research Collections, in April, May and June 2025.
Hope’s Leverhulme-funded book project, When Judas Is Alive: Engendering the Supersession in Medieval Text and Image, focuses on 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 investigates intersections between the personae of Judas and Synagoga, with the potential to also uncover new perspectives on portrayals of Christ. This research compares sources that have not yet been studied together, such as later-medieval Oedipal legends that depict Judas killing his father and marrying his mother, and visual structures of biblical typology in early-medieval stone sculpture.
Hope's 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 current article projects include work on the lament poem 'The Dispute Between Mary and the Cross', the Middle English romance Titus and Vespasian, the Seven Sages of Rome tradition, and the fourteenth-century theological dream poem, The Vision of Piers Plowman.
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, July 2025), 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.
