Dr Laura Kalas

• Reading Heresy in Women's Visionary Texts in the Later Middle Ages (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Dr Roberta Magnani

• 'Female-coded Spirituality in the Writings of Chaucer' (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Dr Roberta Magnani

• Supernatural Abductions in Medieval Literature (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Dr Roberta Magnani

• Autoimmunity (current)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Dr Alan Kellermann

• Gender, Authority and the Mouth in Medieval Culture (awarded 2024)

  PhD

  Other supervisor: Prof David Turner

• EN-113 Literature and Society in Medieval Europe.

  This module provides an introduction to medieval literatures and cultures from 900 to 1500. The module introduces key moments in medieval literary history, together with major cultural and linguistic developments. It provides a basic overview of the Middle Ages which will form the basis for more specialised studies. Topics include significant social and cultural issues of medieval life, such as war and chivalry, gender, courtly love, literature and learning, identity and power. Major texts such as `The General Prologue¿ from Chaucer¿s The Canterbury Tales, will be read in translation alongside extracts from a range of other medieval texts such as Beowulf, The Romance of the Rose and The Book of Margery Kempe. This is a compulsory module for the Honours programme in Medieval Studies, and it is also open to students enrolled in any BA programme.

• EN-120 English Essentials

  This is a skills-based module which will equip students with the technical and critical expertise that is necessary for their academic journey in English Literature and Creative Writing. It is designed to support the transition from post-16 study to undergraduate study and to show students *how* to become successful scholars of English. How should we read texts? How do we write essays? Focusing on an exciting anthology of texts selected by the English academics at Swansea, this team-taught module uncovers the power of written language. We will explore how writers inspire and challenge their readers, how to think critically, how to close-read, how to construct powerful arguments and how to produce written work that is rigorous, academic and convincing. This module empowers students to think, write, and persuade.

• EN-3031 Dissertation - English Literature

  The Dissertation is an optional, two-semester, 40-credit module designed to develop high-level academic skills and intellectual independence in the students. A first-semester skills-building programme will include: research skills, summary skills, bibliographic skills, ability to synthesise succinctly, planning and organisational skills, correct presentation of a thesis and bibliography, presentational skills and public speaking. Students conduct research on a subject of their choice, devised in consultation with a member of the English literature staff. The topic will be devised to fall within staff research and teaching specialisms, broadly defined. Students attend group sessions on research skills in Semesters 1 and 2, and have individual meetings with supervisors in Semester 2.

• EN-3051 Madness, Malady and Melancholia: Literature and Medicine from Genesis to Genomes

  This interdisciplinary, transhistorical, and medical humanities module explores representations of health, disease and disorder in literature from Genesis to the present day. By reading texts which might be considered as illness narratives, we will consider how the human experience of pain and illness can be written into text. How do religious and / or scientific contexts affect experience? How do evolving theories of medicine and the body play into the literary world? From ancient and medieval theories of bodily humours and constitutions, towards contemporary understandings of human existence, we will interrogate texts that seek to express the experience of suffering. In a cultural climate that increasingly emphasises the importance of mental health and wellbeing, an understanding of the textualisation of ill-health is more urgent than ever. Using theories of pain and suffering, the course will focus on the subjection and abjection of the body 'disordered', and ask how far reading and writing themselves might be considered to be acts of therapy.

• EN-M31 Dissertation

  Individual project devised and defined in discussion between supervisor and student.

• EN-M41 Research Practice in English / Contemporary Writing / Welsh Writing in English

  Supervised project on research methodology in practice. Students build a detailed bibliographical plan for their MA dissertation project.

• EN-M85 Agonies and Ecstasies: Saints and Mystics in the Middle Ages

  Luce Irigaray, in situating the religious experience of mystical encounter as `female-coded¿, argues that mysticism ¿is the only place in the history of the West in which woman speaks and acts so publicly¿. In opposition to the `traditional¿ narratives of medieval commentators and theologians whose discourse often proposed women¿s corporeal and psychological states as inferior, the female visionaries and mystics of the Middle Ages represented a radical disruption of conventional religious practices to achieve what Irigaray defines as 'jouissance': an ecstasy born from a transcendent union with God. This module explores a selection of writings by, or about, European medieval women and their spiritual experience in relation to three different modes of religious practice: monastic enclosure; the borderline life of lay religious orders; and holy practice in the world-at-large. It will incorporate medieval and modern interpretative contexts, drawing upon current theories of corporeal feminism, gender, and emotion. It will consider the affective and bodily modes of mysticism largely associated with the female, which have historically been pathologized or demeaned. In examining the interactions of pain and desire, sexuality, the bodily senses, corporeal metamorphoses, and the fragmentation, rupture, and emptying of the mystical body, we will explore the physiology of rapture to unravel the meaning of female religious experience and its textualisation in the Middle Ages.

• EN-M89 Publishing: Cultures and Contexts

  This team-taught module introduces students to different cultures and contexts of the publishing industry and its history. Students will gain both practical and intellectual skills across a range of topics taught by staff from English Literature and Creative Writing. The module begins with focused seminars on book history and print culture, and then moves on to workshops in which students will gain a familiarity with industry terminology and the mechanisms of the book trade. Students will be able to choose from different methods of assessment that develop academic or industry-focused skills.

• HIMD00 Medieval Studies Dissertation

  A dissertation of 15,000 - 20,000 words written on a topic decided by the student in consultation with the dissertation supervisor. This represents Part Two of the MA programme in Medieval Studies.

• HIMM01 Introduction to Advanced Medieval Studies 1: Skills and Approaches

  This module introduces students to recent and current trends in medieval studies, to the research skills required for MA-level research, and to the medieval heritage of South Wales and the surrounding region. Seminars will consider the nature of medieval sources and texts, and a selection of themes that have made a significant impact upon medieval studies in recent years.

• HIMM04 Introduction to Advanced Medieval Studies 2: Themes and Sources

  This module aims to apply the skills and approaches learned in the module HIMM01: Introduction to Advanced Medieval Studies 1: Skills and Approaches to a range of important themes in Medieval Studies, including gender, identity, laws and customs, spirituality, heritage. The module is interdisciplinary and draws on historical, literary and visual sources. The content of the module will be arranged in 2-weekly blocks, with the first week in each block dedicated to introducing students to the specific theme and the second week being used as a practical application of this knowledge to a source or text.

Articles for The Conversation:

April 26, 2019 Meghan Markle reportedly seeks a private childbirth – medieval women really did have one

February 13, 2017 Being lovesick was a real disease in the Middle Ages

November 17, 2016 Medieval women can teach us how to smash gender rules and the glass ceiling

Laura’s research on the faded recipe in the manuscript of The Book of Margery Kempe was featured in The Guardian, here. This research was also featured in the BBC History magazine.

In July 2017 Laura gave a public talk at The Minster, King’s Lynn (the birthplace of Margery Kempe). She was involved, as historical advisor, in a community production in King’s Lynn of Elizabeth MacDonald’s play Skirting Heresy in 2018. She was also involved with the production of a children’s book about Margery Kempe by the curators at True’s Yard Museum, King’s Lynn, in 2019.

• ‘Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know? Margery’s Kempe’s boisterous mysticism and medicine: Uncovered’ (public talk)

  July 2017

  St Margaret’s Church, The Lynn Minister, King’s Lynn

• ‘A Workshop on Taste and the Body in Medieval England’ (discussion of Laura’s paper, ‘The Swetenesse of Confection')

  June 2019

  Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Durham University

• A Day with Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (invited to deliver public workshop)

  July 2019

  Sarum College, Salisbury

• Spiritual Medicine and Suffering in The Book of Margery Kempe (invited: guest lecture)

  November 2019

  Charles University, Prague