Raphaela Rohrhofer

Doctoral Research: My doctorate, which is fully-funded by the AHRC and Scatcherd scholarship, explores the apophatic-cataphatic understanding of the divine, the self, and nothingness through the lenses of love and dread in Julian of Norwich's Revelations and related contemplative and devotional texts. I also wrote a book, Familial Discourses in The Book of Margery Kempe. ’Blyssed be the wombe that the bar and the tetys that yaf the sowkyn,’ which has won several prizes and is now listed as one of 15 reference works on Margery Kempe in Barry Windeatt's new edition. The then newly-discovered Chastising of God's Children manuscript that the Bodleian library acquired was my starter project at Oxford, and the first account uncovering the Latin source texts and strategic scribal alterations of the devotional texts in booklet I, including a manuscript tree, a transcription, and variants, came out recently. 

Next to my studies, I have been working as a Junior Research Fellow at the Ashmolean Museum and member of the 'Talking Sense' research group, and I am 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, where I was the first person from my country (Austria) to read for a postgraduate degree in medieval art history. I am also the first Austrian to be admitted to pursue a doctorate as well as the preceding MSt in Medieval English at Oxford.

Supervisor: Professor Vincent Gillespie

Teaching: undergraduate dissertation supervision and teaching at Lady Margaret Hall, Hertford, and Wadham; lecturing at the English Faculty.

Research Interests: I specialise in late-medieval contemplative and devotional writing and texts of religious instruction in Middle English and Latin.  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 paintings), which allows me to consider the relationships between the visual and the verbal. My personal interests revolve around opera and the human voice, (the history and interpretation of) silence, and playing the piano.

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 and prizes, see: https://oxford.academia.edu/RaphaelaRohrhofer