Profile

Dr O'Mara specialises in medieval English literature. Her main research area is Middle English religious literature, but she is also especially interested in female literacy, and the relationship between manuscript and print in the Middle Ages. She is joint editor (with Dr Carolyn Muessig) of Medieval Sermon Studies and, besides various articles, has published A Study and Edition of Selected Middle English Sermons, Leeds Texts and Monographs, n.s. 13 (Leeds, 1994); (with Dr Oliver Pickering) The Index of Middle English Prose: Handlist XIII, Manuscripts in Lambeth Palace Library (Cambridge, 1999); an edition of essays (with Dr Bridget Morris) on The Translation of the Works of St Birgitta of Sweden into the Medieval European Vernaculars (Turnhout 2000); and Four Middle English Sermons edited from British Library MS Harley 2268, Middle English Texts, 33 (Heidelberg 2002). She is currently working on an AHRB-funded project, A Repertorium of Middle English Prose Sermons.

Selected Publications

My main publications are: A Study and Edition of Selected Middle English Sermons, Leeds Texts and Monographs, n.s. 13 (School of English: Leeds, 1994); The Index of Middle English Prose: Handlist XIII, A Handlist of Manuscripts containing Middle English Prose in Lambeth Palace Library (with Dr O. S. Pickering) (D. S. Brewer: Cambridge, 1999); ed., The Translation of the Works of St Birgitta of Sweden into the Medieval European Vernaculars (with Dr B. A. Morris), The Medieval Translator, 7 (Brepols: Tumhout, 2000); Four Middle English Sermons Edited from British Library MS Harley 2268, Middle English Texts, 33 (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2002); ed., Literature, Readers and Dialogue: Essays by and in Reply to Douglas Jefferson (with Professor J. Clare) (University College Dublin Press: 2006); and A Repertorium of Middle English Prose Sermons (with Dr Suzanne Paul), Sermo 1, 4 volumes (Brepols: Turnhout, 2007); ed. Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Hull Dialogue (with Virginia Blanton and Patricia Stoop) (forthcoming, 2012).

Research

My research specialism is medieval English religous literature, particularly preaching; my other main research interests include the relationship between manuscript and print in the Middle Ages, and female literacy in the medieval and early renaissance period. The four-year AHRC-funded project, A Repertorium of Middle English Prose Sermons, for which I was the project director, finished in 2007. After this I engaged on my next project, an edition of Middle English saints’ lives (in progress), with an American collaborator, Dr Virginia Blanton. In 2011 I spent periods as a short-term fellow both at the Huntington Library in California and the Folger-Shakespeare Library in Washington in preparation for my next project on the Middle English sermon, an edition of Thomas Wimbledon’s Paul’s Cross Sermon of c. 1387. I am also currently involved in research activity on Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe with colleagues in the universities of Antwerp (Dr Patricia Stoop) and Kansas City (Dr Virginia Blanton). Conferences on the subject, leading to forthcoming publications, have taken place or are taking place in Hull (2011), Kansas City (2012), and Antwerp (2013) with supporting funding from the British Academy, the Modern Humanities Research Association, the Bibliographical Society, the Ferens Education Trust, the University of Missouri-Kansas City Women’s Center and the Missouri Education Board.