“I chose the Wilkins Room of the Parker Library to reflect the focus of my fellowship research on the Parker collection. An ‘Easter egg’ was my pen-nib earrings symbolising my interest in writing and books. As the third holder of the recently established Parker Library research fellowship, all of whom have been women, I’m thankful to be in the good company of many women pursuing and facilitating research.”

Alicia Smith is the Parker Library Early-Career Research Fellow in 2023-24. Her research deals with medieval religious literature and culture and modern engagement with this aspect of the past, and currently focuses on the figure of the ‘harlot saint’ Thais.

She completed a BA in English Language and Literature at St Catherine’s College, Oxford and an MPhil in Medieval Literature at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. In 2020 she completed her DPhil at the Queen’s College, Oxford, under the supervision of Professor Annie Sutherland, funded by the Cyril and Phillis Long Studentship and the Clarendon Fund. Her doctoral thesis, ‘Anchoritic Prayer in Time: Enclosure and Encounter, c. 1080-1150’, examined the literature surrounding religious recluses in high medieval England, arguing that prayer, as the central activity of the anchoritic life, is a primary and transformative lens for scholarly analysis of the vocation.

Following her DPhil, she worked in cancer care administration in the NHS for two years alongside several other roles, including Lecturer in English at Somerville College, Oxford, and Research Administrator for an initiative of the Oxford Character Project. She was a co-organiser of the landmark international conference ‘New Visions of Julian of Norwich’ in Oxford, July 2022. As part of the conference events she contributed to a successful TORCH Knowledge Exchange Grant, which enabled her and her co-organisers to work with playwright Cindy Oswin to develop and premiere a new one-woman play on Julian, ‘CELL’.

In 2022-23 she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, Canada. This fellowship allowed her to begin a new research direction on the figure of Thais, an early Christian saint who converted from a life of sex work to a penitential enclosure in a tiny cell, spending three years enclosed before dying shortly after her release. She is currently working on an edition of the twelfth-century Latin verse life of Thais by the bishop Marbod of Rennes. Her ongoing work takes a broad view of the roles of Thais in medieval culture and the complexities of medieval and modern responses to such a difficult story; at the Parker Library she will investigate how Thais’s name and story turned up in unexpected places, particularly manuscript collections of mixed religious and other material.

She has published articles on a variety of subjects, including embodiment and prayer, the figure of the prophet Elisha in a guide for medieval recluses, and solitaries and medievalism in the work of T.S. Eliot. She writes about academic life and faith for a general audience at the Thinking Faith Network.