Parker Early-Career Research Fellow

The Director of the Parker Library, Master and Fellows of the College have approved an annual research post, a twelve-month position, starting in October each year, which will be based within the Parker Library. The annual Parker Early-Career Research Fellow will bring new ideas and new approaches to the research of the Parker Library’s collections, both manuscripts and printed books, becoming a modern part of Parker’s legacy. The College is currently advertising for the Parker Library Early-Career Research Fellowship 2024, details are available at https://www.corpus.cam.ac.uk/about/opportunities/academic-vacancies.

The Parker Early-Career Research Fellow 2023-24

Alicia Smith is the Parker Library Early-Career Research Fellow in 2023-24. Her research deals with medieval religious literature and culture and modern engagement with this aspect of the past, and currently focuses on the figure of the 'harlot saint' Thais. 

She completed a BA in English Language and Literature at St Catherine's College, Oxford and an MPhil in Medieval Literature at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, followed by her DPhil at the Queen's College, Oxford, under the supervision of Professor Annie Sutherland. Her doctoral thesis, 'Anchoritic Prayer in Time: Enclosure and Encounter, c. 1080-1150', examined the literature surrounding religious recluses in high medieval England. She has published articles on a variety of subjects, including embodiment and prayer, the figure of the prophet Elisha in a guide for medieval recluses, and solitaries and medievalism in the work of T.S. Eliot. 

In 2022-23 she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, Canada. This fellowship allowed her to begin a new research direction on the figure of Thais, an early Christian saint who converted from a life of sex work to a penitential enclosure in a tiny cell, spending three years enclosed before dying shortly after her release. She is currently working on an edition of the twelfth-century Latin verse life of Thais by the bishop Marbod of Rennes, a startlingly relevant re-writing of this ancient story in a time of religious and social upheaval.

At the Parker Library she is investigating how Thais's name and story turned up in unexpected places, particularly manuscript collections of mixed religious and other material. Currently her focus is on Thais's appearance in a series of "stories of little importance", as the catalogue calls it, and what this manuscript tells us about how the Thais story moved through the medieval intellectual world. Her ongoing work takes a broad view of the roles of Thais in medieval culture and the complexities of medieval and modern responses to such a difficult story - is it worth delving in to a narrative with such a deep misogynist streak and such an extreme view of religious experience? What did it mean to different people in the medieval period, and what might it mean today?

The Parker Early-Career Research Fellow 2022-23

E.K. Myerson is a cultural critic with a specialist interest in late medieval English culture, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem. Her work at the Parker Library focuses on the medieval English reception of Arabic in the Parker Library Collections, ranging from literary to geographical to astrological and medical manuscripts. She received her PhD in medieval literature from Birkbeck College, University of London, in 2022. Drawing on the artworks of Michael Rakowitz as a conceptual framework, her doctoral research focused on the influence of imported Syrian and imitative Syrian goods in medieval England. Her first book, The Desire for "Syria" in Medieval England, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

Prior to her PhD, E.K. held the Jeremy Griffiths Memorial Studentship for a candidate with a research interest in the history of the book, for her MSt in English 650-1550 at Oxford University (2017-18). She received her BA in English from Cambridge University in 2016, where she received the Derek Brewer Prize for Medieval Literature, and the T.R. Henn Prize for Original Composition. After completing her PhD, she held a research position at Birkbeck College (funded by Birkbeck ISSF/Wellcome Trust), considering the filmmaker, artist and gardener Derek Jarman's responses to medieval medicine, in the context of the AIDS crisis. As part of this last project, she completed a course in Audio-Visual Practice as Research Method at the Derek Jarman Lab, and produced a collaborative essay-film based on her findings, together with artist Sophie Mei Birkin and cinematographer Bartek Dziadosz. 

E.K. aims to bring this creative-critical practice to inform her work at the Parker Library, and curated an exhibition in the Wilkins Room based on the themes and materials of her research in 2023.

The Parker Early-Career Research Fellow 2021-22

Laure Miolo is a historian of late medieval and early modern Europe, specialising in manuscript studies and history of medieval libraries with a special focus on scientific books and practices. She completed her doctorate at the University Lyon II and then held several fellowships and positions at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Bodleian Library, the British Library, the Institut de recherche et d'histoire des textes, the Paris Observatory and the École Pratique des Hautes Études (PSL-Scripta). She was awarded a Neil Ker Memorial Fund Grant from the British Academy and was a Munby Fellow in Bibliography at the Cambridge University Library in 2021.

Her research focuses on medieval scientific manuscripts and book collections in France and England between the late twelfth century to the end of the fifteenth century. For her PhD, which will soon be published, she reconstructed the scientific collection of the early library of Sorbonne, and investigated its owners and users. She pursued her research at postdoctoral level by exploring the astronomical/astrological manuscripts and works of several medieval scholars and their networks such as Pierre de Limoges, Jean des Murs, John of Genoa and Lewis of Caerleon. Her research explores the intellectual practices and the diffusion of scientific knowledge in different milieux. Her approach is based on a detailed analysis of manuscripts together with the edition of unpublished texts. 

At the Parker Library, Laure was working on the little-studied Elbing collection which was previously owned by the Brigittine monastery of Elbing/Elbląg. These volumes were mainly produced in Bohemia, Germany and Poland in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This group of manuscripts were donated to Corpus Christi College in the early seventeenth century by a former fellow, Richard Pernham (d. 1628) and Mary Pernham whose name appears in almost all manuscripts. Laure’s project aims to provide a detailed analysis and a catalogue of the Elbing collection and to investigate the history of this collection from its origin to its reception in Cambridge. She will curate an exhibition focusing on this collection. She was also the convenor of the History of the Book Seminar at the Parker Library.