Nicola McDonald is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. Educated at the Universities of Toronto and Oxford, she came to York in 1999.

Nicola’s research focuses primarily on vernacular late medieval literature, in particular romance (she is currently completing a monograph, Fictions of Audacity, on the cultural audacity of popular Middle English romance) but also including the works of Chaucer and Gower and the diverse contents of household miscellanies. She works, additionally, on medieval women, literacy and ludic culture and on the way in which a collision of medieval and modern texts, as well as medieval texts and modern critical theories (in particular, gender and post-colonial), can yield startling insights into both the middle ages and modernity/post-modernity.

A full biography and bibliography are available here.

Nicola is responsible for the ‘Culture Research Strand’ of England’s Immigrants, and she is particularly interested in questions of ghettoisation and assimilation; the representation (in texts and material culture) of foreigners, aliens and especially racial and religious minorities; and of the way in which the immigrant presence in medieval England had an impact on not only the English’s sense of themselves, but on their culture (including, among other things, their diet, language, standing buildings, fashions in art and clothing).