The Hearing the Voice research team is delighted to welcome Dr Hilary Powell to Durham University. Hilary joins us as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for Medical Humanities and Department of English Studies.
- Eadmer of Canterbury
Hilary has a DPhil in Medieval History from the University of Oxford on healing cults in eleventh- and twelfth-century hagiographical narratives. A Wellcome Trust Research Fellowship held at the University of Cambridge enabled her to extend this research and her monograph Locating Miracle Cures in the Medieval English Landscape, 1050-1200 is close to completion.
Hilary’s work on the Hearing the Voice project will examine representations of voice hearing in Latin miracle narratives and saints’ legends written between c.1100 and 1300. She is particularly interested in exploring the phenomenology and hermeneutics of voice hearing, in recovering the narratives used by miracle recipients to frame their experiences and investigating how those narratives were perceived and reinterpreted by others. She is also interested in examining the relationship between auditory verbal hallucinations and visual apparitions and asks whether such distinctions mattered or were even recognisable in the Middle Ages.
We warmly welcome Hilary to Durham University. For further information about Hilary’s research, please click here. Her contact details will, in due course, be added to the Hearing the Voice, Centre for Medical Humanities and Department of English Studies websites.