Dr Hope Doherty-Harrison

Overview

Biography

Hope Doherty-Harrison is Lecturer in Medieval Studies. 

After two years as a Teaching Fellow in Medieval Art History at the University of Edinburgh, Hope held a Centre for Research Collections Fellowship with the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), also at Edinburgh, working on a group of fifteenth-century manuscripts from Erfurt held in the library collections.

Hope was then a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Yale University in London, and then a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, working on a book project about Judas in medieval literature and visual culture.

Hope joined Birkbeck in September 2026.

Honours and awards

• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy Advance HE, August 2024
• Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship The Leverhulme Trust, October 2024
• Fellow of the Royal Historical Society Royal Historical Society , August 2026

ORCID

0000-0002-7115-2533

Research

Research interests

• Jewish-Christian relations
• Biblical interpretation
• Romance and chivalric culture
• Iconography
• Manuscript studies
• Gender and sexuality
• Medicine and the body

Research overview

Hope’s current and previous work has focused on antisemitism in medieval literature, especially regarding biblical typology and supersessionism, and including intersections with gendered and sexual violence. She is the author of Love and Anti-Judaism in Medieval English Romance: Typologies of Violence and Desire (Manchester University Press, 2025).

She is now working on a book about depictions of Judas in medieval texts and images, aiming to reframe Judas as a figure through whom key theological questions could be articulated, alongside and indeed because of his vilification. 

Research Centres and Institutes

• Steering Committee, Medieval and Early Modern Worlds

Supervision and teaching

Teaching

Teaching modules

• The Medieval World: From Constantine to the Khans
• Lessons from the Medieval and Early Modern Body
• Becoming Modern: Literature and Culture 1800 to the Present
• Medieval and Renaissance Literatures
• Research Skills for Historians
• Medieval and Renaissance Body, Mind, and Soul

Publications