Dr Anne L Baden-Daintree

My teaching and research is focused on Medical Humanities (particularly grief, ageing, and HIV/AIDS), poetry, and Medieval Studies; my current work is in two main areas:

Medieval Reception of the Old Testament Song of Songs: examining the range of allusions and citations of the Song of Songs in medieval English culture, with a focus on the 13^th-15^th centuries. This project encompasses a range of genres, forms and contexts, religious and secular, but the emphasis is on lyric poetry and anchoritic texts. I explore the varied structural uses of the Song and its interpretation, particularly its underlying model of the bride and bridegroom relationship, and the figurative and linguistic framework it provides for a range of religious contexts. This study also explores the landscapes of the Song through both the natural and built environments and the translation of these spaces and landscape features into both spiritual and secular texts.

The Domestic Spaces of HIV/AIDS in literature and visual culture from 1980s to the present:  This project explores representations of people with HIV/AIDS through the significance of domestic space in poetry, memoir, photography, television and prose fiction. It considers the meanings and importance of home in contexts of chronic or terminal illness and looks at the interactions between domestic and medicalized space. This study then moves outwards to look at the therapeutic and symbolic potential of gardens and other cultivated outdoor spaces, before conceptualizing ‘family’ in its figurative relationship to domestic space, and the varied representations of models of family, kinship and parenting/procreation in an HIV/AIDS context.

I have also published on various aspects of medieval poetry, including religious lyrics, Pearl, the alliterative Morte Arthure, and the English poems of Charles d’Orleans, and have ongoing research interests in literature and visual art of grief and bereavement, from the Middle Ages to the present day; poetic form and genre, particularly sonnets, sonnet sequences and elegy; and late medieval representations of ageing in lyric poetry.

Teaching

In 2024-25 I am convening and teaching the following undergraduate units:

The Art of Grief (Y2)

Chaucer and Chaucerians (Y2)

Representing HIV/AIDS (Y3)

This year I am also contributing lectures and seminars on the following units:

Literature 1150-1550 (Y1)

Literature and Medicine (Y3)

Period Unit 1: 1150-1550 (Y3, ELCE part-time programme)