Godelinde Gertrude Perk

I am a Fulford Junior Research Fellow at Somerville and a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages at the University of Oxford.

I am currently undertaking a two-year, EC-funded project titled “Women Making Memories: Liturgy and the Remembering Female Body in Medieval Holy Women’s Texts”. The project centres on vernacular (auto)biographies and visionary texts by devout women from medieval, north-western Europe, and contextualizes these works with the liturgy and memoria (the art of memory).

I hail from the Netherlands. My academic background is in English literature and Psychology, but after completing my PhD at Umeå University (northern Sweden) in 2017, I branched out into exploring the parallels between continental and English vernacular theology while teaching full-time at Mittuniversitetet (Sundsvall, also in Sweden) between 2017 and 2019.

In general, my work considers the intersection of holy women’s texts, medieval literary theory (my dissertation traced the evolution of Julian of Norwich’ literary thought), material culture, and folklore.

My other research interests include cognitive literary approaches, excursions to modern artists such as fin-de-siecle designer Karin Larsson, and research-by-performance explorations: at the Leeds International Medieval Congress of 2018, two friends of mine and I staged a play based on Middle Dutch sister-books, female-authored collections of women’s biographies.