Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities
United Kingdom
fellow
Kate Ash-Irisarri
2025-2026
Home institution
University of Edinburgh
Country of origin (home institution)
United Kingdom
Discipline(s)
History of ideas; Literature; Medieval history
Theme(s)
Behavior & Cognition; Identity; Regional Studies
Fellowship dates
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Biography
Kate Ash-Irisarri is a Lecturer in Late Medieval Scottish & English Literature in the Department of English & Scottish Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Rewriting the Past in Scottish Literature, 1350–1550(2025), and has written on Anglo-Scottish border writing, mnemonics in late medieval advice literature, kingly emotions, and the politics of sanctity in late medieval Scottish historiography. Her areas of interest include memory and the history of emotions, and Anglo-Scottish relations. Kate is co-director of the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Edinburgh.
Research Project
Mirth and Melody: Joy as Cultural Expression in Late Medieval Scottish Literature
As a Sabbatical Fellow at IASH, Kate will be working on completing the first drafts of two chapters of her second monograph, Feeling Joy in Late Medieval Scottish Literature. The project follows on from work on affect and nationhood that formed a core element of her book, Rewriting the Past in Scottish Literature, as well as her research on grief and melancholy in Older Scots texts, such as The Buke of the Chess and Andrew of Wyntoun’s Original Chronicle. This new project investigates the representation and textual performance of joy and its associated emotions, such as mirth, delight, solace, wonder. The project asks: What emotional vocabularies and affective structures surround joy in late medieval Scottish writing and how was joy shaped, expressed, and performed across various genres and forms? What ‘emotional communities’ (Rosenwein, 2006) can be identified through these expressions of joy? How did joy function rhetorically and affectively in relation to other dominant emotional modes of the period?
Research Interests:
Scottish literature; English literature; historiography; memory