Dr Hetta Howes

Lecturer in Medieval Literature

After completing a BA in English and MA in medieval literature at Cambridge University I have been researching and teaching in London for the past 8 years. I’m a lecturer in the English department at City, and am currently finalising the manuscript for my new book (forthcoming with Boydell and Brewer), tentatively entitled Transformative Waters. The book, based on my doctoral research at Queen Mary, University of London, considers how water imagery is used in late-medieval devotional prose addressed to women, exploring how different tropes are gendered for their audience. My research centres on how fluid imagery relates to gender, with a particular focus on Western religious writings – and I’ve become particularly interested during lockdown in how these tropes and ideas permeate modern culture and rhetoric.

I’m an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker and am particularly committed to communicating my research to larger audiences. In lockdown I contributed to a Courtauld’s Gender and Sexuality Research Group for an event called ‘Violent Fluids: Feminist Histories of Blood’ which you can watch here.