Dr Tania Colwell
Position: Lecturer
School and/or Centres: School of History
Email: tania.colwell@anu.edu.au
Phone: (02) 612 54788
Location: Level 6, RSSS Building, 146 Ellery Crescent
Qualification:
BA with Combined First Class Hons in History and French (Australian National University) PhD (Australian National University)
Researcher profile: https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/colwell-tm?term=colwell
Dr Tania M. Colwell is a lecturer in History at the Australian National University where she specialises in the cultural history of late medieval and early modern Europe. Tania’s research explores the ways in which cultural production, especially French manuscript and early book culture, contributed to the formation of identities and alterities throughout this period. In particular, she’s interested in how representations of the materiality and interiority of both lived and imagined experiences open up broader social, political, and philosophical questions within and across communities, time, and place. Her research draws on a range of interdisciplinary approaches from the fields of book and art history, the history of emotions, as well as gender, literary, and reception studies, and explores various issues and themes, including friendship, conduct and governance, crusading, intercultural encounters, the marvellous and monstrous, and patronage.
Tania graduated with her PhD from ANU in 2009, since which time her research has been funded by such organisations as the British Academy, the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, and the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature (UK). As well as publishing articles and chapters in a range of international journals and collections, including the Journal of Medieval History, The Library, and the Journal of the Early Book Society, Tania’s recent publications include Women and Work in Premodern Europe: Experiences, Relationships and Cultural Representation, a collection of essays co-edited with Merridee Bailey and Julie Hotchin (2018).
Tania has taught history at ANU since 2011 in different capacities, including convening courses which have spanned medieval and early modern Europe, premodern and modern imperial expansion, and emotions history across the premodern world. Tania has also worked in academic publishing and editing, and in public history with l’Historiale de la Vendée, the Department of the Senate, the National Museum of Australia, and the National Trust (UK).
- Cultural, social, and political history of late medieval Europe, esp. France and England
- Gender history of late medieval Europe
- Manuscript, early book, and literary culture
- History of emotions
- Early encounters; travel narratives and ethnographies
- Identity and alterity in the medieval world
Research Projects:
In Progress:
Reading Mélusine: Romance Manuscripts and their Audiences in Late Medieval France, c. 1380–1530
This book examines the historical reception and cultural significance of the popular Mélusine romances, ancestral tales of the Lusignan family which centre on a fairy-dragon and her crusading sons, from the dual perspectives of the French romance manuscripts and their audiences. By investigating the patronage, presentation, transmission, and ownership of the surviving corpus of over thirty manuscripts produced between c. 1380 and c. 1530, Reading Mélusine explains how and why the texts retained their hold on later medieval imaginations, and explores how the cultural values embedded in the romances facilitated their circulation across France and beyond.
Beyond Wonder: Emotions of Encounter in the Medieval World
This project explores representations of emotions of encounter in a French collection of travel narratives and ethnographic texts produced between around 1300 and 1530. It examines shifts in the way emotions shaping experience of intercultural encounter were treated and understood and reflects on their implications for understandings of identity in and beyond France. Research for ‘Beyond Wonder’ has been supported by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions and national and international competitive funding.
Completed:
Women and Work in Premodern Europe: Experiences, Relationships, Cultural Representation, with Merridee L. Bailey and Julie Hotchin.
This collection investigates how the working lives of historical women were enacted and represented, and analyses the relationships that shaped women’s experiences of work across the European premodern period. By exploring the array of meanings attributed to work for and by women, this project re-evaluates concepts and experiences of work as sites of social, economic, and cultural production in which women’s identities were created and performed between 1100–1800.
In Progress
Monographs:
Reading Mélusine: Romance Manuscripts and their Audiences in Late Medieval France, c. 1380–1530
Beyond Wonder: Emotions of Encounter in the Medieval World
Articles and Book Chapters:
Article: ‘Friendship, Trust, and Reciprocity: Navigating Intercultural Difference across the Mediterranean’, for special issue of Emotions: History, Culture, Society, entitled ‘Entangled Histories of Gender in the Mediterranean’, ed. by Megan Cassidy-Welch and Giovanni Tarantino.
Chapter: ‘Crusading in/and Later Medieval France’ for Routledge Handbook of French History, ed. by David Andress et al.
Published
Edited collections
Tania M. Colwell, ed. with Merridee L. Bailey and Julie Hotchin, Women and Work in Premodern Europe: Experiences, Relationships and Cultural Representation (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018)
Tania M. Colwell, ed. with Christine Debono, Comparative Perspectives on Bills of Rights (Canberra: National Institute of Social Sciences and Law, ANU, 2004)
Articles and books chapters:
Tania M. Colwell, with Merridee L. Bailey and Julie Hotchin, 'Approaching Women and Work in Premodern Europe', in Women and Work in Premodern Europe: Experiences, Relationships, Cultural Representation, ed. by Merridee L. Bailey, Tania M. Colwell and Julie Hotchin (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018) pp. 1-29.
Tania M. Colwell, 'Melusines Past, Present, and Future', in Melusine's Footprint: Tracing the Legacy of a Medieval Myth, ed. by Misty Urban, Deva F. Kemmis, and Melissa Ridley Elmes (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp, 388-403.
Tania M. Colwell, ‘Emotives and emotional regimes’, in Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction, ed. by Susan Broomhall (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017). pp. 7-10.
Tania M. Colwell, ‘The Middle English Melusine: Evidence for an Early Edition of the Prose Romance in the Bodleian Library’, Journal of the Early Book Society for the Study of Manuscripts and Printing History, vol. 17 (2014): 254–282
Tania M. Colwell, ‘Fragments of the Roman de Mélusine in the Upton House Bearsted Collection’, The Library: Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 7th ser., 13.3 (2012): 279–315
Tania M. Colwell, ‘Gesture, Emotion, and Humanity: Depictions of Mélusine in the Upton House Bearsted Fragments’, in The Inner Life of Women in Medieval Romance Literature: Grief, Guilt, and Hypocrisy, ed. by Jeff Rider and Jamie Friedman, New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 101–27
Tania M. Colwell, ‘Patronage of the Poetic Mélusine Romance: Guillaume l’Archevêque’s Confrontation with Dynastic Crisis’, Journal of Medieval History, 37 (2011): 215–29
Tania M. Colwell, ‘Mélusine: Ideal Mother or Inimitable Monster?’, in Love, Marriage, and Family Ties in the Later Middle Ages, ed. by Isabel Davis, Miriam Muller, and Sarah Rees-Jones, International Medieval Research, 11 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 181–203
Tania M. Colwell, ‘Robin Hood: The Archetypal Outlaw Hero’ in Outlawed! Rebels, Revolutionaries and Bushrangers Catalogue (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2003), pp. 24–29
Tania M. Colwell, 'Epilogue', in Matthew W. Morris (ed.), A Critical Edition of Couldrette's Melusine or Le Roman De Parthenay (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003), pp. 341–344
Tania M. Colwell, ‘Medieval Masculinities: Transgressions and Transformations’, in Our Medieval Heritage: Essays in Honour of John Tillotson for his 60th birthday, ed. by Linda Rasmussen, Valerie Spear, and Dianne Tillotson (Cardiff: Merton Priory Press, 2002), pp. 137–56
Tania M. Colwell, ‘Why Richard III?’, The Ricardian, 12.151 (2000): 161–78
Media:
Magna Carta, ABC, Radio National Big Ideas: discussion with Paul Barclay and Prof. Paul Pickering (ANU), June 2015
2019
Nominated for ANU CASS Teaching Award, Sem. 2
2016
Scouloudi Foundation Publication Award (with Merridee L. Bailey and Julie Hotchin)
2014
Australian Academy of the Humanities, Humanities Travelling Fellowship
ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Associate Investigator
2013
Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature (Oxford), Travel Award
2012–13
British Academy, Neil Ker Memorial Award
Australia and New Zealand Association of Medieval and Early Modern Studies
Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literatures
HIST1214: Empires in Global History: 1200 to the present
HIST2219/6509: Tudor-Stuart England c. 1485–1714: Politics, Society, Culture
HIST2220: Western Europe in the Later Middle Ages, c. 1300–1500
HIST2243/6243: Vikings, Crusades, Mongols: Shaping Medieval Europe, c. 850–1300
HIST8021: Readings in History – Specialist Topic Supervisor
HIST9101: The Craft of History: Approaches, Themes, Methods
Special Honours Seminar: History of Emotions in Premodern Europe, c. 1100–1800
