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Professor Diane Watt

Professor and Head of Department
MA (Glasgow), MA (Bristol), DPhil (Oxon)

Contact

Email: jij@aber.ac.uk
Office: D69
Phone: +44 (0)1970 621534

Additional Interests

Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Diane is a member of the steering group of the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Studies c1100-1800 (IMEMS), a collaborative venture involving researchers in the English and History Departments at Aberystwyth and those at the University of Wales, Bangor. The Institute runs a fortnightly seminar series by video-link between Aberystwyth, Bangor and Swansea which attracts a range of international speakers. For information about the Institute click on http://www.aberbangorpartnership.ac.uk/en/med-modern.php

Conferences

Diane is a member of the Programming Committee of the annual International Medieval Congress. She is responsible for the Women’s and Gender Studies Strand. Further information about the IMC can be found at its website. She is a member of the Programming Committee for the New Chaucer Society bi-annual conference to be held at Swansea University in 2008.  Further information can be obtained from the website at http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~chaucer/congress/congress2008call.php. She is a member of the Gender and Medieval Studies Steering Group: see   www.medievalgender.co.uk 

The John Gower and Hypertext Project

Diane is involved in the John Gower and Hypertext Project, which is an effort by British and North American scholars interested in how hypertext affects the reading of and research into John Gower’s poetry. To that end, they are gathering online resources on Gower here for the benefit of students and medievalists everywhere. For information click on the following link: http://gowerproject.org/

Research

Professor Diane Watt's main research interests are in medieval English literature (especially Ricardian poetry, religious texts, and women’s writing) and theories of gender and sexuality. She also has interests in early-modern English and Middle-Scots literature.

She was awarded the John Hurt Fisher Award 2004 and the Charles A Owen Jnr Distinguished Visiting Professorship in Medieval Studies at University of Connecticut 2005

Staff Publications

Books

Medieval and Renaissance

Medieval Women's Writing: Writing By and For Women (Cambridge: Polity, 2007)

Secretaries of God: Women Prophets in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997; reissued in paperback, 2001). Winner of the Mrs Foster Watson Memorial Gift for 1998.

Amoral Gower: Language, Sex, and Politics in Confessio Amantis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). Research for this book was supported by a Leverhulme Fellowship.

Ed. Medieval Women in Their Communities (Cardiff/Toronto: University of Wales/University of Toronto Press, 1997).

Co-ed. with Claire Jowitt, The Arts of Seventeenth-Century Science (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).

Ed. The Letters of the Paston Women (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2004)

Theory

Co-ed. with Richard Phillips and David Shuttleton, Decentring Sexualities: Politics and Representations Beyond the Metropolis (London: Routledge, 2000)

Other Major Publications

Diane has published a number of articles in journals such as Studies in the Age of Chaucer 24 (2002), Exemplaria 13 (2001), Philological Quarterly 78 (1999), Comparative Literature 50 (1998), and Renaissance Quarterly 50 (1997). She has contributed entries to The New Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming in 2004), and to other dictionaries, guides and encyclopaedias. She has also written a number of chapters in edited volumes.

Reviews

Diane has written reviews and review essays for Arthuriana, English, Medium Aevum, Mystics Quarterly, Reformation, Studies in the Age of Chaucer. She is a reviewer for ABES.

Editing

Diane is general editor, with Jacqueline Murray, of the series ‘Gender in the Middle Ages’, published by Boydell and Brewer. Books in the series investigate topics concerned with medieval gender, from a literary or historical perspective. Proposal forms can be downloaded from the press website.

She is also general editor, with Denis Renevey, of the series ‘Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages’, published by University of Wales Press. The series is interdisciplinary in nature, and is largely concerned with the religious culture of medieval Western Europe. Proposal forms can be downloaded from the press website.