Lucia Akard
British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow

Profile

Biography

Doctor, DPhil.

Lucia Akard is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow. She is a cultural and social historian of sex and gendered violence in the late Middles Ages, with a particular focus on France and Burgundy. She has teaching expertise in medieval British and European history. She is involved in shaping the growing field of medieval consent studies, and has organized a conference on medieval consent and edited a collection of essays on the same subject.

She has previously held the position of Associate Lecturer in Medieval British History at the University of York and College Lecturer in Medieval Studies at Oriel College, Oxford.

Research

Overview

Lucia's current research project is titled ‘Sex Workers and Community in Dijon, 1400-1500' and is funded by the British Academy. It explores the horizontal and vertical connections between sex workers, and seeks to understand how they built community ties with one another and the wider city.

Her first monograph, Victims and Survivors of Rape in the Late Middle Ages, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press, and presents a methodological intervention for how we might understand, study, and center the experiences of women who suffered gendered violence in the past.

Publications

Full publications list

Monograph

Victims and Survivors of Rape in Late Medieval France and Burgundy, under contract, Oxford Historical Monographs series, Oxford University Press, forthcoming.

Edited Collections

Introduction and Editor with Alice Raw, “Medieval Consent: A Critical Issue,” special issue in journal Medieval Feminist Forum, forthcoming.

Articles

“Medieval Sex Work: a State of the Field,” in The English Historical Review, 139, issue 596, (February 2024): 181–192.

“Unequal Power and Sexual Consent: The Case of Cassotte la Joye” in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 44, no. 1 (2022): 285-292.

“Futures of Medieval Consent,” with Alice Raw, in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 44, no. 1 (2022): 363-367.

Public Engagement Articles

“Community Resistance to Rape in the Late Middle Ages,” commissioned by the Sundial, digital publication of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, forthcoming.

“A Medieval #MeToo,” The Public Medievalist, October 2018.
Book Reviews

Review of Trauma in Medieval Society, eds. Wendy J. Turner and Christina Lee, in The English Historical Review, 135, no 575, (2020): 990-992.