Dr Megan Leitch

Biography

Career Overview

• August 2020 - present: Reader in English Literature, Cardiff University
• August 2016 - July 2020: Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Cardiff University
• September 2012 - July 2016: Lecturer in English Literature, Cardiff University

Education and Qualifications

• 2012: PhD, University of Cambridge
• 2009: MPhil, University of Cambridge
• 2008: BA (Hons), University of British Columbia

Honours and awards

• Welsh Crucible 2022 Future Research Leader
• Cardiff University Research Leave Fellowship, 2018-19
• Visiting Research Fellow, St Catherine's College, University of Oxford, 2015

Professional memberships

• Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy
• New Chaucer Society
• International Arthurian Society, British Branch
• Canadian Society of Medievalists

Speaking engagements

Invited addresses include:

London Medieval Society Colloquium to mark the 550th anniversary of Thomas Malory’s death, November 2021: ‘Malory and the Crux of “Conscious Artistry”’

University of Reading, November 2021: ‘Sleep and its Spaces in Middle English Literature: Emotions, Ethics, Dreams’

National Museum of Wales, Youth Forum, November 2021: ‘Night at the Museum’

University of Bristol, Department of English Research Seminar, March 2019: ‘Sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature’

Swansea University, MEMO Symposium by the Sea (keynote), June 2018: ‘Drowsy Knights and Dreamers: The Ethics and Affect of Sleep from Chaucer to Shakespeare’

University of Cambridge, English Faculty Medieval Seminar, May 2018: ‘“grete luste to slepe”: Sleeping through it all in Middle English Romance, Drama, and Dream Visions’

Cardiff BookTalk Special World Poetry Day Event, March 2018: ‘Telling Tales’ (Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Patience Agbabi’s 21st-century reinterpretation)

Oxford Medieval Society, termly visiting speaker event, February 2018: ‘Fighting for Mordred in the Fifteenth Century: Insular Identities and the Geopolitics of Literary Treason’

London Old and Middle English Research Seminar (LOMERS), November 2015: ‘“grete luste to slepe”: Sleep and its Spaces in the Pre-modern Imagination’

University of Cambridge, Magdalene Medievalists Seminar, June 2015: ‘Chaucer, Hypertextuality, and the Memory of Middle English Popular Romance’

University of Oxford, Medieval Seminar, October 2014: ‘Drowsy Knights and Dreamers: The Ethics and Affect of Sleep from Chaucer to Malory’

Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, Conference on Representing War and Violence in the Pre-Modern World, September 2013: ‘”For treason walketh wonder wyde”: civil strife and pragmatism in the literature of the Wars of the Roses, c.1437-c.1497’

Durham University, Department of English Seminar, March 2013: ‘Sleep and Romance from Chaucer to Shakespeare’

University of Bristol, Centre for Medieval Studies Seminar, October 2012: ‘”For treason walketh wonder wyde”: Treason, Truth, and Pragmatism in the Literature of the Wars of the Roses, c.1437-c.1497’

Committees and reviewing

Director, Cardiff Centre for Medieval Studies

Co-editor, Arthurian Literature

Publications

• Date
• Type
• Selected

Teaching

At Cardiff I enjoy teaching a range of undergraduate and MA modules on medieval literature. These include:

• ˜Transgressive Bodies in Medieval Literature (Year One)
• ˜Chaucer's Gender Politics: Chivalry, Sex and Subversion in The Canterbury Tales (Year Two)
• ˜Medieval Romance: Monsters and Magic™ (Year Three)
• ˜Heroes and Villains from Chaucer to Shakespeare™ (MA)

Research interests

• medieval romance; Arthurian literature; Chaucer; dream visions
• history of the emotions
• gender studies
• medical humanities
• literature and law
• treason, sleep, and dwarves in Middle English literature
• Malory's Morte Darthur, the Wars of the Roses, and the fifteenth century
• periodisation and continuities between medieval and early modern English Literature

I am happy to supervise PhD students in any of these areas. Current and recent PhD students I have supervised have focused on Arthurian literature, medieval romance, and medieval queens in early modern drama (see the supervision tab).

My first monograph, Romancing Treason: The Literature of the Wars of the Roses (Oxford University Press, 2015), analyses texts from a variety of genres, and romance in particular, alongside contemporary social and political discourses, demonstrating that this literary culture is broader and richer than has previously been recognized. While the mid-to-late fifteenth century often goes unaddressed by both medievalists and early modernists, seen as a blip or rupture between the highs of Chaucer (and his  immediate successors) and the developments of Tudor writers, my book examines the central role of treason in Malory'™s Morte Darthur (written in 1469; printed by Caxton in 1485) and in understudied contemporary romances such as the prose Siege of Thebes and Siege of Troy, Melusine, and Caxton's translations. Romancing Treason establishes some characteristics for the space between Lancastrian and Tudor literary culture, articulating the idea of a literature of the Wars of the Roses. Drawing upon theories of political discourse and interpellation, of the power of language to shape social identities, this book explores the ways in which, in this textual culture, treason is both a source of anxieties about community and identity, and a way of responding to those concerns. I argue that this literature offers instruction by both negative and positive reinforcement, with the former -“ the mode of paraenesis or admonition -“ attaining a distinctive primacy. Prose romances play a central role in this ethical discourse, but the concentrated yet contested ways in which treason is discussed in attainders, petitions, political poems, chronicles, and correspondence, as well as in literary texts, point us to a key word and concept of the time.

Reviews of Romancing Treason: The Literature of the Wars of the Roses state that it ‘brilliantly sheds new light by its very insistence on seeing [Malory’s] work in a larger, national context’ (David Lawton, Renaissance Quarterly 71.4, 2018), gives an ‘account of romances [that] outlines a particular historical change with measure and assurance’ (Eliot Kendall, Review of English Studies 66, 2015), and ‘presents a cogent, consistent, and compelling hypothesis, one that is theoretically nuanced and well researched’ (Matthew Giancarlo, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 38, 2016).

My research interests in Arthurian Literature and medieval romance have also led to three co-edited volumes: Romance Rewritten: The Evolution of Middle English Romance, co-edited with Elizabeth Archibald and Corinne Saunders (D. S. Brewer, 2018); A New Companion to Malory, co-edited with Cory James Rushton (D. S. Brewer, 2019); and Cultural Translations in Medieval Romance, co-edited with Victoria Flood (D. S. Brewer, 2022).

My work also focuses on Chaucer and on the medical humanities and history of the emotions. I have published on Chaucer's poetics and tropes of gendered authorial anxiety in The Chaucer Review, and both Chaucer and romance are central to my second monograph. Entitled Sleep and its spaces in Middle English literature: Emotions, ethics, dreams (Manchester University Press, 2021), this study explores the affective, ethical, and epistemic issues raised by sleep from the twelfth century to the early seventeenth, ranging across the genres of romance, fabliau, drama, and dream vision. This first book-length study of sleep's vital implications for how medieval people thought of and fashioned themselves, individually and collectively, elucidates a pre-modern mode of reading and moulding gendered bodily performance that shapes many works of medieval and early modern literature, and the continuities between them. It also questions the distinctions we can (or should) make between literature and medical tracts, conduct books, and sermons - between imagination and practice.

My work on sleep, emotions, and the medical humanities is featured in a recent blog post on the public engagement platform, The Polyphony.

Supervision

I am currently supervising PhD students working on medieval Arthurian literature (including English, French, Welsh, Cornish, and Breton traditions), crusading interests in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century English prose romances, and medieval English queens on the early modern stage. I welcome applications from prospective postgraduate students planning research in these areas or in the other areas listed under my research interests. Informal enquiries are always welcome.

Current supervision

David Mason

Research student

Elisabeth Jones

Research student

Jessica Shales

Research student

Past projects

(Primary supervisor)  Dr Martha Baldon (awarded 2018): 'The Logic of the Grail in Old French and Middle English Arthurian Romance' (funded by the AHRC)

(Supervisor; 50%)  Dr Victoria Shirley (awarded 2018): 'The Galfridian Tradition(s) in England, Scotland, and Wales: Texts, Purpose, Context, 1138-1530' (funded by the AHRC)

(Primary supervisor)  Dr David Mason (awarded 2020): ‘Combat, Crusade and Conversion: Prose Romance and the English Printing Press, 1473-1534’ (funded by the SWW DTP)