Dr Raphaela Rohrhofer
Research Fellow
- Phone
- +44 (0)1334 46 1874
- rsr8@st-andrews.ac.uk
- Office
- 204
- Location
- Kennedy Hall
Biography
Academic Qualifications
DPhil (Oxon), MSt (Oxon), MA (Courtauld), Mag. phil. ([BA+MA] Vienna), BA (Vienna)
Research
Dr Raphaela Rohrhofer specialises in the poetics, theology, and philosophy of contemplative literature and art in the late medieval British Isles, continental Europe, and beyond. She is the Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at St Andrews' School of English.
Her first monograph, Familial Discourses in The Book of Margery Kempe, received a series of prestigious prizes. She co-authored an extensive study of the then newly discovered compilation of spiritual material also containing The Chastising of God's Children (Bodleian MS Don. e. 247), completing her stemmatic analysis and identifying the manuscript's Latin source texts before it had even been foliated. Her main area of study examines the subtle layers of divine ineffability, especially as articulated in the work of the anchoress Julian of Norwich, the first known female author writing in English. Her recent work on Julian's nought appears in the newly-released volume of The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England. She has also recently been invited to contribute to both the Cambridge Companion to Margery Kempe and the Cambridge Companion to Julian of Norwich.
Dr Rohrhofer is currently working on three major projects:
- Julian of Norwich's Apophatic Poetics of Love and Dread, a monograph based on her Oxford dissertation written under the supervision of Vincent Gillespie and fully funded by the AHRC and Scatcherd Foundation.
- Co-editing “New Visions of Julian of Norwich,” a special issue of Medieval Feminist Forum collecting the papers from the eponymous conference she co-organised at Somerville College, Oxford with funding from OMS, TORCH, and Medium Aevum. This was not only the first-ever conference dedicated to Julian but also the largest hybrid conference Oxford had hosted to date.
- Dr Rohrhofer's current major research project, Contemplative Nothingness in the Late Medieval British Isles and Beyond, is supported by the Leverhulme Trust. Her work explores the heights of rapture as expressed in the hermeneutical impasse of nothing and nothingness in the contemplative literatures and visual artefacts of the global Middle Ages. Building on international material cultures and primary texts in more than a dozen languages, this project establishes connections between contemplative traditions and environments that have never been posited previously.
Before coming to St Andrews, Dr Rohrhofer held lectureships in Medieval English Literature and Medieval Art History at the University of Oxford, where she also earned her DPhil and MSt in Medieval English Literature, both fully funded. She was the first person from her country to read for these degrees at Oxford and the first in her family to go to school past the age of sixteen. She also holds an MA in Medieval Art History (specialising in manuscript illumination) from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, again as the first person from her country. She began her academic career pursuing three simultaneous degrees at the University of Vienna, in English Literature, Linguistics, and Art History, being awarded numerous prizes, grants, and scholarships along the way. This journey was recently highlighted in an article about her as a "hidden champion" (p. 7).
Dr Rohrhofer is a passionate opera and Lieder enthusiast; visits to libraries with medieval manuscript holdings and to many of Europe's major museum collections are both an academic necessity and a treasured part of her research. She lectures at undergraduate and postgraduate levels and supervises dissertations across both. She is always happy to hear from students!
