Directory of Research and Expertise

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Research Summary and Profile

Research interests:

Culture, English Literature, Gender studies, Literatures in a modern language, Manuscript studies, Medieval History

Summary of research interests and expertise:

Clare A. Lees is Professor of Medieval Literature, Director of the Institute of English Studies, and Vice Dean of the School of Advanced Study at the University of London.  She is a Fellow of the English Association and a Fellow of King’s College London.

Clare’s research interests include the early medieval literatures, languages, and cultures of Britain and Ireland, gender and sexuality studies, and histories of place and belief. Her current work explores how modern and contemporary poets, writers, and artists engage with early medieval cultures. Her public work includes the BBC2 documentary series, Art that Made Us (April 2022 and BBC iplayer), consultancy for Jeremy Deller’s short film Deliverers about the Lindisfarne Gospels, for the Laing Gallery, Newcastle (2022), and participation in the Newcastle Poetry Festival (since 2018). In 2016-18, she held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow, for ‘The Contemporary Arts and Early Medieval Culture in Britain and Ireland’ to work on a poetry anthology for Bloodaxe Books and related monograph.

Clare joined SAS in 2018 as Director of the Institute of English Studies, after nearly two decades as Professor of Medieval Literature and History of the Language at King's College London. A longstanding Fellow of the English Association and Fellow of King's College London, Clare works closely with colleagues in English Studies nationally in the English Association and University English and is a former member of the AHRC Peer Review College. She was a member of the English subpanel for REF2014 and is a member again for REF2021. Internationally, she has served as a research assessor in Europe, the USA, Canada and Australia, as well as for research funding organisations in Europe such as the Institut Francais, the RCN (Norway) and the ERC. During the course of her career in the US and the UK, Clare has supervised over 20 PhD students and mentored several Early Career researchers in medieval literature and culture, many of whom have gone on to academic careers. She was the founding Director of the London Arts and Humanities Partnership (LAHP), an AHRC-Doctoral Training Partnership and has a strong career-long interest in postgraduate and early career research.

Clare has worked collaboratively throughout her career, often with Gillian R. Overing, Wake Forest University: her most recent book with Gillian is The Contemporary Medieval in Practice (London: UCL Press, 2019). She co-edited Literature To 1100 with Josh Davies, Kings College London, for the Yearbook in English Studies in 2022. 

Languages:

	Spoken	Written
French	-	Good
Spanish	Good	Good
German	-	Good
Italian	-	Good

Publication Details

Related publications/articles:

Date	Details
01-Nov-2023	“Remembering Æthelflæd, 1854–2019,” Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, and Women in Tenth-Century England, ed. Rebecca Hardie (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023), pp. 277-301 Chapters Explores Victorian, Modern and Contemporary understandings of this most important early medieval woman, Æthelflæd
01-Jan-2023	Literature to 1200, co-edited with Joshua Davies, Yearbook of English Studies 52 (2022 Edited Book The edited collection brings together a group of international researchers who offer some of their current work on the earliest centuries of medieval literature and culture, under the title Literature to 1200. Posing the question of what the study of the early Middle Ages looks like in 2022, the essays  offer a snapshot of work in the field. This volume demonstrates the urgent social, cultural, and political questions that animate early medieval English studies; it explores the various communities who engage with it, both past and present; and it demonstrates the breadth and variety of research in this vital period of literary and material culture.
01-Oct-2022	“Old English at the Midcentury: Poetry, Scholarship, and Fiction in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s,” Thinking of the Medieval: Midcentury Intellectuals and the Middle Ages, ed. Benjamin A. Saltzman and R. D. Perry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), pp. 147-66; Chapters Examines evidence for the creative re-use of Old English in the critical decades of the mid-twentieth century
15-Jul-2022	Conversations among Friends: Ælfflæd, Iurminburg, and the Arts of Storytelling,” with Gillian R. Overing, in Women’s Friendship in the Medieval Literature Collaboratively written, this chapter examines the slender evidence for women's friendship in the early English medieval period and explores it in relation to modern re-imaginings of these relationships.
01-Nov-2019	“Gender and the Subjects of History in the Early Middle Ages,” Medieval Historical Writing: Britain and Ireland, 500-1500. eds. Emily Steiner, Jennifer Jahner and Elizabeth Tyler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 299-318; Chapters
15-Oct-2019	“’Her, the Water, and me’: Three Women Go North,” American/Medieval Goes North: Earth and Water in Transit (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2019), pp. 25-49; Chapters With Gillian R. Overing
07-Oct-2019	The Contemporary Medieval in Practice Monographs This book ‘does’ Medieval Studies differently by bringing it into relation with the field of contemporary arts and by making ‘practice’, in the sense used by contemporary arts and by creative-critical writing, central to it. Intersecting with a number of urgent critical discourses and cultural practices, such as the study of the environment and the ethics of understanding bodies, identities, and histories, this short, accessible book offers medievalists a distinctive voice in multi-disciplinary, trans-chronological, collaborative conversations about the Humanities. Its subject is early medieval British culture, often termed Anglo-Saxon Studies (c. 500–1100), and its relation with, use of, and re-working in contemporary visual, poetic, and material culture (after 1950).
15-Apr-2019	A Word to the Wise: Men, Gender, and Medieval Masculinities,” Rivalrous Masculinities: New Directions in Medieval Gender Studies, ed. Ann Marie Rasmussen (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019), pp. 1-26; Chapters

Research Projects & Supervisions

Current PhD topics supervised:

Dates	Details
From: 01-Oct-2020 Until: 30-Aug-2024	Medieval Women, Embroidery and Fabric Millie Horton-Insch, co-supervised with Professor Robert Mills (Art History, UCL), funded by LAHP studentship, passed with minor corrections.
From: 01-Oct-2019 Until:	Miranda Rainbow, Understanding the Norman Conquest through the Bayeux Tapestry CDP Award, The British Museum, co-supervised with Professor Michael Lewis
From: 01-Jan-2020 Until:	Women in the Trade of Medieval Books in the Twentieth Century Natalia Fantetti, co-supervised with Laura Cleaver, funded by AHRC CULTIVATE, passed with minor corrections

Available for doctoral supervision: Yes

Professional Affiliations

Professional affiliations:

Name	Activity
Fellow, King's College London
Fellow, English Association

Consultancy & Media

Available for consultancy:

Yes

Media experience:

Yes

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