Emily Dolmans
I am a Lecturer in Medieval Literature at the University of East Anglia, where I specialise in medieval romances and historical texts in Middle English, Anglo-Norman French, and Latin. I am interested in multilingualism, historiography, material culture, ecocriticism, and the relationships between literature and cultural geography, especially borders and boundaries, displacement, migration, travel, intercultural exchange, and conceptions of home. My monograph, Writing Regional Identities in Medieval England, examines the kinds of regional identities that emerge from cultural contact in Britain in the High Middle Ages.
I am also beginning work on a second project on literary depictions of migration and displacement, from 1100 to 1500. Using travel narratives, pilgrimage texts, romances, and saints' Lives, as well as historical and legal documents, I plan to explore representations of alienation, emotional responses to displacement, and the role that territory plays in the conceptualization of one's sense of belonging.
Before I came to UEA I was a lecturer at Keble College and Exeter College, University of Oxford, where I taught English literature from 650 to 1550. I completed my doctorate at Oxford in 2017. Prior to this, I completed an MPhil, also at Oxford, and a BA (Hons) in English Literature, with minors in Art History and Anthropology, at McGill University.
I am also beginning work on a second project on literary depictions of migration and displacement, from 1100 to 1500. Using travel narratives, pilgrimage texts, romances, and saints' Lives, as well as historical and legal documents, I plan to explore representations of alienation, emotional responses to displacement, and the role that territory plays in the conceptualization of one's sense of belonging.
Before I came to UEA I was a lecturer at Keble College and Exeter College, University of Oxford, where I taught English literature from 650 to 1550. I completed my doctorate at Oxford in 2017. Prior to this, I completed an MPhil, also at Oxford, and a BA (Hons) in English Literature, with minors in Art History and Anthropology, at McGill University.
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Publications by Emily Dolmans
Using romances and histories from England's multilingual literary milieu, including the Gesta Herewardi, Fouke le Fitz Waryn, and Richard Coer de Lyon, this study examines some of England's contact zones and how they influence understandings of English identities during the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. Moving from local identity in Ely, to the transcultural regions of Lincolnshire and the Welsh Marches, and finally investigating England as a border region from a global perspective, this book examines the diversity of Englishness, the effects of cultural contact on identity, and how English writers imagined their place in the world.
Papers by Emily Dolmans
Scholars have frequently read medieval English travel narratives as frameworks for understanding England and its inhabitants. This is particularly true of depictions of the Middle East and Asia, where encounters with strange landscapes, exotic animals, and foreign, or even monstrous, peoples reinforce the familiarity of the protagonists’ home in England. This paper, however, will investigate instances in which Anglo-Norman romance heroes travelling abroad are so influenced by the cultures and environments in which they find themselves that they begin to refer to England as ‘un estrange pais’, a foreign country. This is particularly true in Boeve de Haumtone and Gui de Warewic, in which the eponymous heroes are compelled to imagine themselves through the eyes of those who are not English, underlining both the inherent relativity of foreignness and the mutability of geographic identity. They interact with their surroundings, form attachments to the land and those who live there, claim territory, and become rulers. This type of narrative enacts an elision of difference between the “English” self and “foreign” other. The foreignness of these displaced heroes proves constitutive of their identities, albeit in different ways. Like other travel narratives, these knights’ encounters with the exotic reflect on their home territory, but they also yield a more unfamiliar, nuanced, and pluralistic vision of England, placing the audiences’ homeland in the wider landscape of the known, and unknown, world.
Conferences Organised by Emily Dolmans
Other by Emily Dolmans
I co-host an AHRC/TORCH-funded podcast, 'Uncommon Knowledge'. For each episode we interview a researcher about the interesting ideas, factoids, or tidbits that they've been exploring.
Using romances and histories from England's multilingual literary milieu, including the Gesta Herewardi, Fouke le Fitz Waryn, and Richard Coer de Lyon, this study examines some of England's contact zones and how they influence understandings of English identities during the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. Moving from local identity in Ely, to the transcultural regions of Lincolnshire and the Welsh Marches, and finally investigating England as a border region from a global perspective, this book examines the diversity of Englishness, the effects of cultural contact on identity, and how English writers imagined their place in the world.
Scholars have frequently read medieval English travel narratives as frameworks for understanding England and its inhabitants. This is particularly true of depictions of the Middle East and Asia, where encounters with strange landscapes, exotic animals, and foreign, or even monstrous, peoples reinforce the familiarity of the protagonists’ home in England. This paper, however, will investigate instances in which Anglo-Norman romance heroes travelling abroad are so influenced by the cultures and environments in which they find themselves that they begin to refer to England as ‘un estrange pais’, a foreign country. This is particularly true in Boeve de Haumtone and Gui de Warewic, in which the eponymous heroes are compelled to imagine themselves through the eyes of those who are not English, underlining both the inherent relativity of foreignness and the mutability of geographic identity. They interact with their surroundings, form attachments to the land and those who live there, claim territory, and become rulers. This type of narrative enacts an elision of difference between the “English” self and “foreign” other. The foreignness of these displaced heroes proves constitutive of their identities, albeit in different ways. Like other travel narratives, these knights’ encounters with the exotic reflect on their home territory, but they also yield a more unfamiliar, nuanced, and pluralistic vision of England, placing the audiences’ homeland in the wider landscape of the known, and unknown, world.
I co-host an AHRC/TORCH-funded podcast, 'Uncommon Knowledge'. For each episode we interview a researcher about the interesting ideas, factoids, or tidbits that they've been exploring.