Centre for Medieval Studies
Dr Emma Nuding
A graduate of the University of Cambridge and King’s College London, Dr Emma Nuding completed her PhD at CMS in September 2022. Her thesis, Fenland Pilgrimage: A Literary History of St Guthlac of Crowland, is a longitudinal study of the fenlands’ most intriguing hermit-saint. The study is methodologically innovative, incorporating both historical and literary approaches, and it breaks period divides between the medieval and the modern.
Emma has taught Old and Middle Englishes at CMS, as well as a range of literature modules in the English department, spanning classical, medieval and modern texts. She holds a PGCE from the University of Bristol and is currently working towards her Associate Fellowship of the HEA. A member of groups such as Teachers of Old English in Britain and Ireland (TOEBI) and the US-based Disinventing Old English (DOE), she has also served as a peer reviewer for Brepols Publishers. On a freelance basis, Emma also works as a medieval language consultant for heritage, media and creative industries: previous clients have included Bath Abbey, a BFI-backed director and a BAFTA-winning screenwriter.
Alongside working on the monograph stemming from her thesis, Emma is currently embarking on a new project, entitled Lesbian Medievalisms. This project will focus on the reception of medieval language relics, motifs and culture in queer women’s writing in the twentieth century. It will ask how queer women’s medievalisms depart from their androcentric and heteronormative cousins, which tend to dominate both our cultural landscapes and scholarly horizons.
Publications
‘Gazing on Guthlacian Reliques: John Clare’s Pilgrim-Tourists and St Guthlac of Crowland’, John Clare Society Journal, 41 (2022), 25–44 (available on ProQuest)
'Monastic ecopoetics in the thirteenth-century fens: Henry de Avranches' Vita Guthlaci', Journal of Medieval Ecocriticisms, 3 (2023), 1-28
Writing St Guthlac of Crowland, Medieval to Modern (under contract with Boydell and Brewer)
‘Hair Cut Short like a Mediæval Page’: Queer medievalisms in Gwen Lally’s historical pageants and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928)’ (forthcoming in Studies in Medievalism)
‘Place-Based Old English: Teaching Guthlac in the Yorkshire Fens’, Teachers of Old English in Britain and Ireland Newsletter, 40 (2024), 8-12
Presentations and Invited Talks
—Invited speaker at the ‘Ideology, Society and Medieval Religion Seminar Series’, University of York, on the topic of ‘St Guthlac of Crowland’s twelfth-century Translatio cum Miraculis and its pilgrim auences’, December 2022
—'Sir Guthlac? A Pilgrimage by Knight in the Middle English Sir Gowther’, International Medieval Congress, Leeds 2021
—‘Anglo-Latin hagiography and Guthlac’s “simulated” sister: St Pega reimagined for the thirteenth century’, IMC, Leeds 2020
Awards and Prizes
— Laura Bassi Scholarship by the Editing Press as a Junior Academic (2022)
—Doctoral Fellow for York’s Humanities Research Centre (2021)
— Wolfson Postgraduate Scholarship in the Humanities (2018)
— Seton-Cavendish Book Prize from Downing College, Cambridge (2013)
