My research deals with medieval religious literature and practice, and the responsibilities and challenges of understanding that history today. My EU-funded MSCA project, titled 'Rethinking medieval and modern sexualities through the harlot saint Thais', is focused on a little-known early Christian saint whose dramatic and provocative conversion story offers a unique lens onto ideas about sex, sex work, and their relationship to religion and spirituality in medieval and modern culture. My goal is to track this complex, often troubling figure through her various incarnations in the European Middle Ages and beyond, and to ask what kinds of questions she helps us ask and answer today. 

I have previously held research fellowships at the Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, during which I explored specific case studies of adaptation of the Thais story. Following my doctoral thesis work on prayer in the lives and literature of medieval solitary recluses in England, I have published on a range of subjects including embodiment and prayer, the medievalism of T.S. Eliot, the figure of the prophet Elisha in a medieval Latin text, and the depiction of prostitution in literature. 

Journal articles

“Poet-bishop and harlot saint: Marbod of Rennes’ life of Thais in context,” Viator 55:2 (2024), 33-65.

“‘Each way means loneliness – and communion’: reading anchoritic literature with T.S. Eliot,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 13:1-2 (2022), 21-53.

“‘The example of Elisha’: prayer and prophetic discourse in the Regula Reclusorum,” Journal of Medieval Latin, 31 (2021), 57-78.

“The anchoritic body at prayer in Goscelin of Saint-Bertin’s Liber Confortatorius,” Journal of Early Middle English, 3:1 (2021), 101-14.

Encyclopedia entries

“Prostitute, prostitution: Literature,” in The Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception, vol. 25 (De Gruyter Brill, 2025). 

“Anchoress of Mansfield, Hymn to the Virgin,” in Encyclopedia of Medieval Women’s Writing in the Global Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). 

“Letters concerning the enclosure of Christina Carpenter,” in Encyclopedia of Medieval Women’s Writing in the Global Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). 

Doctoral thesis

"Anchoritic Prayer in Time: Enclosure and Encounter, c. 1080–1350," University of Oxford, 2020.