Lucia Akard
British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow

Profile

Biography

Lucia Akard is a historian of gendered violence and sexuality in the late Middles Ages. Her first monograph, Victims and Survivors of Rape in the Late Middle Ages, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Her current research explores communities of sex workers in Dijon in the fifteenth century. She has published on consent to sex in marriage in Studies in the Age of Chaucer and on the state of medieval sex work studies in The English Historical Review. She has previously held the position of 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.

Projects

Current research project: Sex Workers and Community in Dijon, 1400-1500

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.

Teaching

Other teaching

Reading and Writing in Medieval England

Arguments and Analysis

Evidence and Methods

Work

Extraordinary Lives: The Medieval Worlds of Princes, Monks and Unconventional Women