Dr Ayoush Lazikani

About

Dr Ayoush Lazikani is a tutor, teaching and lecturing in Old English and Middle English, at the Faculty of English and Jesus College, University of Oxford.

As a researcher, Dr Lazikani works in the history of emotions, specializing in devotional writing of the 11th to 13th centuries. Her research considers English, Arabic, Anglo-Norman, Latin, and Persian texts, and she has particular interests in literature written for solitary contemplatives.

Dr Lazikani has published widely in these areas. Her 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 offers close comparative analyses of affect in medieval Arabic and English contemplative texts.

Dr Lazikani 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. She also contributed to the ‘450th Anniversary: 12 Objects’ project at Jesus College (‘Object 6’), watch on YouTube here.