Dr Rowan Wilson

Teaching

At Merton, I teach medieval English papers for undergraduates covering the period range 650-1550 (chiefly Prelims Paper 2 and FHS 2, as well as some specialised Course II tutorials). I serve as director of studies for students pursuing Course II at the college, and am also available to supervise undergraduate and MSt dissertations on a range of medieval topics.  

Research

I work, mostly, on medieval devotional literature, bad feelings, odd vibes, and stray currents of marginal and dissonant experience across time. I am returning to Merton, having pursued my BA there; I then read for an MSt in medieval English at St Hilda’s, spent a year as a visiting researcher at the University of Bonn, and completed my DPhil, also at Oxford, in 2026. My DPhil research focused on affective struggles in late medieval devotional culture, exploring the pastoral prescriptions for and anxieties of devotees who fail to feel as they feel they ought to in facing down Christ’s suffering. I am working on a monograph based on this research, alongside beginning work on a new project, exploring the abolitionist possibilities of medieval narratives that involve people escaping from religious confines and commands. My wider research interests include queerness and transness in premodernity, medieval disability, liberation theology, the history of prisons and prisoner resistance, and how we can approach reading medieval literature in a time of unrelenting capitalist extraction, climate collapse, and genocide.  

I am always happy to have a chat about the strange / awful / jarring / transformative pleasures of medieval texts—just get in touch.  

Publications

-'Memory in Written Record: Memorial Practices at Work in Middle English Copyings of Flyleaf, Marginal and Added Verse', Review of English Studies 73.311 (2022): 632–647

-'Reading the “human braille”: Discourses of Ableism and Medievalism in the Reburial of Richard III', Year's Work in Medievalism 35.36 (2023), open access

-'"Good to feel with, good to think with"? Troubling the Affective Encounter in Medieval Bernardine and Anselmian Marian Dialogues', Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 50.2 (2024): 184-211

-'Archival Fiction as Trans Literature', in The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature, ed. Douglas A. Vakoch and Sabine Sharp (Routledge, 2024)  

-'"I hope þat þer bee noon siche cristen man": The Prick of Jewish "Stony-Heartedness" in Medieval Passion Meditations', in Emotions on the Fringes, ed. Felix Lummer (Trivent, 2024)

-'"You do not get to consent to yourself, even if you might deserve the chance": Nature's Coercion and Transgender Volition in Le Roman de Silence', in Reconsidering Consent and Coercion in Medieval Literature, ed. Hannah Piercy and Jane Bonsall (Brepols, 2025), open access

I also write general-interest criticism and fiction: my work can be found online in a range of publications, including Aeon, Public Books and the Times Literary Supplement.