Isabella Lewis

Profile

I completed my BA in Joint Honours History and Russian Civilisation (International) in 2021, which included an Erasmus+ Study Abroad year at Leiden University between 2019-2020. For my undergraduate dissertation—'Possession, titillation, and fantasy’: The Imperial Conception of Pornography Between 1860 and 1910—I conducted research into the sexual conception of racial categories during British colonial expansion, using British anthropological and ethnographic writings as my source base.

In 2022 I achieved my MA in Social and Cultural History at the University of Leeds where I continued to explore histories of gender, sexuality, race and the body in the Medieval, Early Modern, and Modern periods. For my MA dissertation I built upon my interest in representations of sex and sexual violence by researching these themes in hagiographical texts from the Byzantine High Middle Ages. My thesis—Disrupting Violence: Sexualised Violence, Gender Performance, and Race in Byzantine Hagiography—showed that the limited scholarship on sex and sexuality in the Greek lives has misinterpreted sexual violence as romantic entanglements or erotic tales. 

In October 2024, I began a PhD in the Institute of Medieval Studies specialising in Byzantine Studies which is UKRI funded through a studentship from the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities.

Research interests

My PhD research tests and expands upon the findings of my MA thesis. I will propose a radically new understanding of the gendered and racialized portrayal of sexual violence in Byzantine hagiographies from the 5th to the 12th centuries, by addressing the following questions:

A) How does the hypersexualisation of certain figures complicate our ability to identify victims and perpetrators of sexual violence?

B) How are racialized descriptions weaponised in personifications of sexual threat?

C) How does the gendering of the victims change the stories we tell about the violence they experience?

In this research, I will examine a common but misunderstood theme of Byzantine hagiography: sexual violence. I will critically reconsider the victimhood, agency, and sexual morality of gendered and racialized figures in Greek saints' lives, written between the 5th and 12th centuries. I will unveil existing historiographical misconceptions, especially as they appear in translations, and will propose a more complex, intersectional, history of sexual violence in Byzantium. I will place my findings within wider late antique and Western medieval scholarship, advancing debates on race, gender, and sexuality in the Middle Ages.

Qualifications

• MA Social and Cultural History
• BA Joint Honours History and Russian Civilisation (International)