Nicholas Watson (academic)

Nicholas Watson is an English-Canadian medievalist, literary critic, religious historian, and author. He is Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English at Harvard University and chair of the Harvard English Department.^[1][2]

Education and early career

Nicholas Watson was raised in Winchester, England.^[3] After an undergraduate education at the University of Cambridge and graduate work with Vincent Gillespie at Oxford, he began his scholarly career with a 1987 dissertation at the University of Toronto on the Yorkshire hermit Richard Rolle.^[3] Watson is Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English at Harvard; before joining the faculty at Harvard he taught at the University of Western Ontario from 1990 to 2001.^[4]

Career

Watson has written on vernacularity, gender, religious censorship, ritual magic, and mystical literature; he has also edited and translated important works from medieval Latin and Middle English. He is credited with introducing the concept of "vernacular theology" to literary and religious studies.^[5] His scholarship has explored figures such as Julian of Norwich, William Langland, Marguerite Porete, Geoffrey Chaucer, John of Morigny, Richard Rolle, the Pearl Poet, and Archbishop Thomas Arundel.^[3]

Awards

In 1990 he was awarded the John Charles Polanyi Prize.^[6] His research has been supported by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Guggenheim Foundation,^[7] the American Council of Learned Societies,^[8] and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.^[9] In 2016 he was named a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America.

Works

• Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority (1991)
• (with Anne Savage) Anchoritic Spirituality: Ancrene Wisse and Associated Works (1991)
• "Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel's Constitutions of 1409" (1995)
• Richard Rolle: Emendatio vitae and Orationes ad honorem nominis Ihesu (1995)
• (with Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans) The Idea of the Vernacular: an Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520 (1999)
• "The Middle English Mystics" in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (1999)
• (with Fiona Somerset) The Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and Postmedieval Vernacularity (2003)
• (with Jacqueline Jenkins) The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love (2006)
• (with Fiona Somerset) Truth and Tales: Cultural Mobility and Medieval Media (2015)