MARS Academic Staff

Contact our academic staff:

Dr Emily Corran is a historian of medieval Europe, specialising in late medieval ethical thought. She particularly looks at manuals for priests and investigates the advice they were given on how to resolve dilemmas.

Dr Marie-Pierre Gelin is a Lecturer (Teaching); her primary research interest is the ecclesiastical and monastic history of England in the period 1000-1250, with a particular focus on visual culture.

Professor Hugh Kennedy works on the history of the Middle East in the early Islamic period (c.600-1050 CE), using both Arabic language historical writing and archaeological evidence. He also has a keen interest in the Crusades, especially castes and material culture.

Dr Patrick Lantschner works and teaches on Europe and the Islamic world from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance and is especially interested in comparative and transnational approaches.

Professor Sophie Page works in European medieval magic and astrology, especially in relation to religion, natural philosophy, and cosmology. She also researches the history of animals.

Professor John Sabapathy works on the comparative history of Europe/Christendom, primarily in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, and on the Anthropocene, the proposed epoch in which humans became geological forces globally.

Dr Antonio Sennis is Associate Professor of Medieval History. He is a cultural historian whose focus is Western Europe in the period 800-1200 and in the writing of history in the Middle Ages.

Early Career Fellowships at MARS

The Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies has a strong history for sponsoring early career Fellowships. In recent years, recipients of Early Career Fellowships at UCL include: 

• Dr Rodrigo Garcia-Velasco, 'Documentary Afterlives: Recycling the Past in Premodern Iberian Judiciaries, 1371-1600' Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, 2022-.
• Dr Emily Ward, ‘Adolescence and Belonging in Medieval Europe, c.1000 -c.1250’, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (2021-2023).
• Dr Johanna Dale, 'Liturgical and literary landscapes: the cult of St Oswald of Northumbria in the German-speaking world', Joint AHRC project (Grant reference: AH/X003841/1)
• Dr María Ángeles Martín Romera, ‘Surveilling Communities: Public office holders under communities' surveillance in Southern Europe (13th-15th century), Marie Skłodowska-Curie Junior Fellowship (UCL, 2018-20); Ramón y Cajal tenure track award lectureship and Humboldt Fellowship, KMU Munich University (both July 2020– ).
• Dr Danica Summerlin, 'The relationship between the 'old' and 'new' laws in the twelfth century' British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (2014-2016).
• Minne de Boodt, ‘Inspiring ideas. A cross-contextual analysis of political thought in Burgundian Flanders (1400-1550)’, doctoral student at KU Leuven and visiting scholar at the Institute of Historical Research, September–November 2022).

We are keen to hear from prospective applicants for early career Fellowships. 

Find out more about the Centre's affiliated research staff:

Professional Services

Email: history.programmes@ucl.ac.uk

Location: History Department, G04, 24 Gordon Square, UCL 

Archaeology

Dr Corisande Fenwick
Research interests: late antique and Islamic archaeology, particularly in North Africa and the western Mediterranean; urbanism; medieval states and empires.

Professor Andrew Reynolds
Research interests: the archaeology of early medieval societies in north-western Europe. Interdisciplinary approaches to the study of the early middle ages, landscape archaeology and state formation.

Centre for Editing Lives and Letters

Dr Robyn Adams
Research interests: history of the Renaissance book; correspondence and manuscript networks; history of libraries, history of reading.

Dr Matthew Symonds
Research interests: history of the Renaissance book, the history of information, networks of correspondence, and the digital humanities.

English

Dr Marilyn Corrie
Research interests: English and French literature of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries; manuscripts produced in England in this period; later medieval English literature, including Lydgate and Malory; interactions between clerical teaching and Middle English literature.

Professor Susan Irvine
Research interests: Old English prose literature and language, especially those of King Alfred's court in the last part of the ninth century; late Old English manuscripts and their implications for literary activity in English in the transitional period between Old and Middle English; the use of rhetoric in Old English poetry.

Dr Natalie Jones
Research interests: Middle English literature, especially devotional literature and the religious lyric; the relationship between text and image in Old and Middle English literature; the patristic sources of Old and Middle English literature; Middle English devotional manuscripts and book history; Middle English language and dialect. 

Professor Richard North
Research interests: Old English semantics, Old English elegiac and heroic poetry, including Beowulf, Old Icelandic pre-Christian Eddic and Skaldic poetry, including Haustlǫng and Thórsdrápa, Anglo-Saxon paganism and Old Norse mythology, Sagas of Icelanders, including Víga-Glúms saga, the world of Faerie in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Hebrew and Jewish Studies

Dr François Guesnet
Research interests: European Jewish history in the early modern and modern period; Jewish political culture.

Dr Israel Sandman
Research interests: Medieval Jewish thought, including biblical interpretation, philosophy, and mysticism; and medieval Hebrew manuscript study. In particular: Hebrew scribality in medieval Italy and the possibility of institutionally organised copying; relations between Jewish and Christian biblical interpretation in text and in art.

History

Dr Angus Gowland
Research interests: Renaissance psychology, medicine, politics, ethics, and rhetoric; theories of melancholy and dreaming in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Dr Lucia Patrizio Gunning
Research interests: history of collecting; diplomatic and state involvement in the collection of antiquities in the 18th and 19th centuries and its implications in contemporary ethics, restitution and cultural heritage relations with countries of provenance. Protection of and reactions to and reconstruction of heritage at risk, especially post-earthquake, including the use of information technology.

Dr Benet Salway
Research interests: late Roman history; Roman law and its medieval reception (see also the Projet Volterra).

History of Art

Professor Rose Marie San Juan
Research interests: Early modern Italian art and culture (especially Rome and Naples); the reconception of the visual image through travel, cross-cultural exchange, and the emergence of natural history and cabinets of curiosities.

Professor Robert Mills
Research interests: Medieval visual culture; representations of pain and punishment; saints; gender and sexuality; animal studies; translation; medievalism and medieval film.

Dr Allison Stielau
Research interests: Northern European art and material culture, c. 1400-1700; early modern Germany; European Reformations; early modern print culture, precious metalwork, coins, and medals; gold as symbol and commodity; material practices and transformations.

Professor Alison Wright
Research interests: Italian art and drawing / design from the 14th to the earlier 16th century. Conceptual and material relations across media including metalwork, paint and stone, artistic practice, functions, patronage, questions of ideology and reception.

Dr Jacopo Gnisci 
Research interests: Medieval art and architecture of Africa; Ethiopic, Syriac, Armenian, and Copto-Arabic illuminated manuscripts; Ethiopian and Eritrean art; historiography; Oriental Orthodox Christianity.

School of European Languages, Culture and Society (SELCS)

French:
Professor Jane Gilbert
Research interests: Medieval French and English literature, especially narrative; constructions of identity; Narcissus, mirrors, doubles and the uncanny; comparative literature; literary theory, especially gender, queer theory, anthropology, psychoanalysis.
Dr Thibaut Maus de Rolley
Research interests: Renaissance literature and thought; comparative literature (French, Italian, Spanish); narrative fiction; early modern demonology and witchcraft; travel writing; literature and geography; the early modern imagination of space; history of science. 

German:
Dr Sebastian Coxon
Research interests: short comic narratives of the later Middle Ages; laughter, jest and ridicule in courtly and urban culture; medieval drama; Wolfram von Eschenbach's 'Parzival'.

Italian:
Professor Catherine Keen
Research interests: Dante's Commedia and minor works; Italian vernacular lyric from the Sicilians to Petrarch; exile; classical reception; Brunetto Latini; medieval urban culture, political literature and chronicles. 
Dr Lisa Sampson
Research interests: Italian Renaissance theatre and literature; court culture; early modern women's writing; academies and cultural institutions; early modern genre theory. 

Scandinavian:
Dr Haki Antonsson
Research interests: history and culture of Scandinavia between c. 900 and c. 1300; the Christianization of Scandinavia; cultural interaction between the British Isles and Scandinavia.
Dr Erin Goeres
Research interests: Old Norse-Icelandic Literature, especially skaldic verse, kings' sagas and translated romance.

Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American:
Dr Alexander Samson
Research interests: literature, culture and history of early modern Spain and Latin America.

School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES)

Dr Sergei Bogatyrev
Research interests: Medieval Russia; Muscovite court culture; cross-cultural contacts in Early Modern Europe, Ivan the Terrible.