Holly is the New Chaucer Society Postdoctoral Fellow (2015-2016) at St Louis University and, following this, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow (2016-2019) at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her current research interest is in the 100+ illuminated manuscripts of poems by Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, specifically in using the border artist as a means of situating these books of Middle English literature within the rich variety of late medieval textual culture.
Holly completed her Ph.D. thesis (“Collaborative Manuscript Production: Illuminators and their Scribes in 15th-Century London”) at the University of York, UK, in 2013. Since then, she has conducted a survey of English illumination in books printed c. 1455-1500 (as the Society for Renaissance Studies Postdoctoral Fellow, and with a grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art), to assess the extent to which English illuminators diversified their trade during this critical and transitional stage in the history of the book. She has completed a forthcoming catalogue in the Harvey Miller/Brepols series, An Index of Images in English Manuscripts from the Time of Chaucer to Henry VIII c. 1380- c.1509 (Cambridge II, with Ann E. Nichols). Holly’s latest 4-year study will culminate in a monograph - The Illuminators of the Middle English Poetic Tradition - and her paper for the Yale Medieval Colloquium will outline the method, motivation and aims of this project.