معرفی
Dr Alicia Smith is a Retaining Fee Lecturer in English at Somerville College, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on medieval religious literature in Latin and English, with special attention to anchoritic studies and theoretical approaches to medievalism. She holds a PhD from Oxford awarded in 2020 for her thesis on anchoritic prayer and enclosure. Smith has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (Toronto) and the Parker Library (Cambridge). She co-organized the 2022 international conference 'New Visions of Julian of Norwich' and is co-editing a special issue of Medieval Feminist Forum stemming from this event.
Her educational background includes a doctorate supervised by Professor Annie Sutherland. Research interests include medieval hermits, the 'harlot saint' Thais, and intersections between modernist poetry (e.g., T.S. Eliot) and medieval anchoritic texts. She has published widely on liturgical poetry, monastic networks, and medieval women's writing, with recent work appearing in Viator and postmedieval.
Key projects include a research trajectory on Thais in medieval culture, leading to articles on poet-bishop Marbod of Rennes. Her work bridges medieval primary sources with contemporary theoretical frameworks, exploring topics like phenomenology of enclosure and intertextual connections between medieval and modern texts.
Professional contributions include editorial work for encyclopedic entries on medieval women's writing and peer-reviewed reviews of monastic studies. She maintains active participation in interdisciplinary medievalist dialogues through conferences and journal editing.
