Dr Ayoush Lazikani
Ayoush Lazikani is a SEDA-accredited tutor, teaching and lecturing in Old English and Middle English. As a researcher, Ayoush specializes in the Global Middle Ages, the history of emotions, and the natural world, and she has published widely in these areas. If you would like to hear Ayoush talk about her work, you may be interested in this podcast for the Cambridge Centre for International Research.
In her early work, she focused on devotional writing of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, particularly for solitary contemplatives in the Christian tradition. She has since undertaken substantial work in comparative literary studies: her research considers English, Arabic, Anglo-Norman, Latin, and Persian texts, among other languages, and in her most recent work she has been writing on medieval ideas about the moon from around the world.
Ayoush’s first book, Cultivating the Heart: Feeling and Emotion in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Religious Texts (University of Wales Press, 2015), studies the languages of feeling—especially the interrelated affections of compassion, love, and sorrow—in texts and church wall paintings.
Her second book, Cry of the Turtledove: Emotion in Christian and Islamic Contemplative Texts, c. 1100-1250 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), is situated within the growing emphasis on 'globalization' in medieval studies, and it offers close comparative analyses of affect in medieval Arabic and English contemplative texts. In this book, Ayoush develops a framework for comparative work on affect which she calls ‘avian emotion’. An approach of ‘avian emotion’ invites us to gaze across cultures as well as within them, migrating from one to the other with sensitivity. Just as a bird flies across continents and nations, a comparative study seeks to become a kind of flight, moving across regions while remaining sensitive to the specific rhythms of the surrounding environment.
Ayoush's third book, Moons that Haunt and Bless: Lunar Imaginings in Literature and Art, 700-1600, is forthcoming and tells the story of how medieval people around the world perceived the moon, that ‘supremely prized image for poets’ according to poet Carol Ann Duffy (Duffy 2009: xvii). This book is written for those who may be unfamiliar with the medieval world and its literatures and arts. The sources come from an expansive global range: from Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Indian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Mayan, Norse, Persian, Polynesian, and Welsh traditions, among others. All these sources reveal the complex ways people around the world who lived from c. 700-1600 interpreted and interacted with the moon.
She has also published numerous essays in the Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures, the Journal of Medieval Monastic Studies, Leeds Studies in English, and various edited collections; and she is an Associate Editor for the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Medieval Women's Writing in the Global Middle Ages.
