Raphaela Rohrhofer
Doctoral Research: My doctorate at the University of Oxford, where I am fully-funded by the AHRC and Scatcherd scholarship, explores strategies of apophatic-cataphatic understanding and the dialectical forces of love and dread in late medieval contemplative literature in Middle English and Latin in England. The bulk of my work in recent months has been centred on Julian of Norwich, and on a newly-discovered manuscript of The Chastising of God's Children that the Bodleian Library acquired. My first book, Familial Discourses in The Book of Margery Kempe. ’Blyssed be the wombe that the bar and the tetys that yaf the sowkyn’, was published in 2014 and won several prices. I am also a Junior Research Fellow at the Ashmolean Museum and the Academic Representative of Lady Margaret Hall's MCR, for which I organised a conference last year. Previously, I was a cataloguer for the Courtauld Institute of Art's Gothic Ivories Project. I am the first person from my country (Austria) to be admitted to pursue a doctorate - as well as the preceding MSt - in Medieval English at Oxford.
Supervisor: Professor Vincent Gillespie
Research Interests: I specialise in late-medieval contemplative and devotional writing and texts of religious instruction. Another string in my bow is my background in medieval art history, and particularly in manuscript illumination (as well as Gothic ivories, treasury art, and wall paintings), which allows me to consider the relationships between the visual and the verbal.
Education: DPhil in Medieval English Literature (Oxford/ongoing)
MSt in English Literature 650-1550 (University of Oxford)
MA in Medieval Art History (Courtauld Institute of Art)
MA in English Literature and Linguistics (University of Vienna)
BA in English Literature and Linguistics (University of Vienna)
BA in History of Art (University of Vienna)
For a list of publications, see: https://oxford.academia.edu/RaphaelaRohrhofer
