Diane Watt

This article is about the British medievalist. For the Canadian politician, see Dianne Watts.

Diane Watt FLSW is a British medievalist, currently Professor of Medieval English Literature at the University of Surrey. She previously held a personal chair at Aberystwyth University, where she was Deputy Director of the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (IMEMS). She was Charles A. Owen Jr. Distinguished Visiting Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Connecticut in 2005.^[1] She was awarded a Snell Exhibition to study at Balliol College, University of Oxford,^[2] and was awarded her DPhil in English Literature in 1993. She is a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.^[3]

Works

Watt is the author of three important books on late medieval women's writing: Secretaries of God, Medieval Women's Writing and Women, Writing and Religion. She has also written a study of the work of Chaucer's friend and literary executor John Gower, entitled Amoral Gower which received critical praise in the journal Speculum.^[4] She was awarded the John Hurt Fisher Prize for "significant contribution to the field of John Gower Studies" in 2004.^[5] She has also published an edition of the letters of the Paston women,^[6] and has edited and co-edited a number of other works. The Lesbian Premodern, co-edited with Noreen Giffney and Michelle M. Sauer^[7] was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in the LGBT Anthology category.^[8] Watt was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship in 2016 for her project "Women's Literary Culture Before the Conquest".^[9] Major Research Fellowships are awarded to "enable well-established and distinguished researchers in the humanities and social sciences to devote themselves to a single research project of outstanding originality and significance". From 2015-2017 she led the Leverhulme-funded international research network, "Women's Literary Culture and the Medieval English Canon".^[10]

Publications

• Secretaries of God. DS Brewer. 1997. ISBN 0859916146.
• Amoral Gower. U of Minnesota P. 2003. ISBN 9780816640287.
• The Paston Women: Selected Letters. Boydell & Brewer. 2004. ISBN 9781843840244.
• Medieval Women's Writing. Polity. 2007. ISBN 978-0-7456-3255-1.
• Women, Writing and Religion in England and Beyond, 650-1100. Bloomsbury. 2019. ISBN 9781474270625.

External links

• Diane Watt profile at University of Surrey

References

1. "Visiting Professors". University of Connecticut. 2 February 2015. Retrieved 29 September 2017.
2. "Balliol College Archives & Manuscripts: The Snell Exhibitioners 1699 - 1999". Balliol College Archives & Manuscripts. Retrieved 29 September 2017.
3. Learned Society of Wales. "Fellows".
4. Baker, Denise (2005). "Rev. of Watt, Amoral Gower". Speculum. 80 (5): 1395–97. doi:10.1017/S0038713400002359. Retrieved 29 September 2017.
5. "John Hurt Fisher Prize". John Gower Society.
6. Watt, Diane (2004). The Paston Women: Selected Letters. Boydell & Brewer. ISBN 9781843840244.
7. Giffney, Noreen; Sauer, Michelle; Watt, Diane, eds. (2011). The Lesbian Premodern. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-230-61676-9.
8. "24TH ANNUAL LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD CURRENT SUBMISSIONS". Lambda Literary.
9. "Women's Literary Culture Before the Conquest". Women's Literary Culture Before the Conquest. University of Surrey. Retrieved 29 September 2017.
10. "Women's Literary Culture and the Medieval English Canon". Women's Literary Culture and the Medieval English Canon. University of Surrey. Retrieved 29 September 2017.