Hannah Lucas

I am the Newby Trust Research Fellow in English at Newnham College, Cambridge. From October 2025, I will be an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the Technische Universität Berlin. Previously, I was a Lecturer in English at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where I also completed my D.Phil (Ph.D), which won the Swapna Dev Memorial Book Prize. 

My research lies the intersection of literary history, theology, philosophy, and the medical humanities—focused particularly on contemplative texts and practices, and the relationship between the medieval and the modern.

My first monograph, Impossible Recovery: Julian of Norwich and the Phenomenology of Well-Being, was published in January 2025 with Columbia University Press. It brings the Julian of Norwich texts into dialogue with post-Heideggerian phenomenologies of health to investigate the connections between illness, well-being, and revelation. 

I have also published articles on D. W. Winnicott's psychoanalysis and medieval mysticism (American Imago), apophasis in AI Text-to-Image models (Religions), medical language in Julian of Norwich's Revelations (Review of English Studies), religious identity and textiles in The Book of Margery Kempe (Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures), and more.

I am the co-convenor of the research network, 'Contemplation: theory / practice', a forum for exploring the theories, histories, and applications of contemplative traditions from around the globe.

Beyond my research, I also enjoy teaching yoga and developing my teaching through trainings and my community of fellow practitioners.