Lena Vosding is a Gerda Henkel Research Fellow and a Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College. As a medievalist, her main focus is on texts and manuscripts from Late Medieval women’s convents, especially related to the corporate identity of the communities. One of her leading questions is how religious groups defined themselves and their purpose in society, how they tried to both distinguish themselves from ‘the others’ and maintain close relations with them at the same time. She explores how pre-modern women's communities worked on their own vision of life and acted confidently in a patriarchal society, and how this knowledge could contribute to present social discourses in western society.

Lena started her research and teaching career on manuscripts containing monastic chronicles and manuals of various types. This initiated her ongoing interest in theories of memory and communication culture and their possible application to Medieval sources for a deeper understanding of pre-modern social mechanisms. At present, her work centers on the ars dictaminis, the Medieval art of letter writing, and its implementation in actual letters from and to women's convents both in Latin and the vernacular. Her monograph is the analysis of three letter books from the Benedictine nuns‘ convent of Lüne (Germany), which she and a bi-national team are currently translating into a hybrid edition („The nuns' network“ https://diglib.hab.de/edoc/ed000248/start.htm).

Codicology, textual criticism, and Digital Humanities are Lena’s second focus. Here, she is interested in new techniques as well as the discussion about greater accessibility of sources and research, especially as so many manuscripts from (and about) Late Medieval women are still scarcely explored or even unknown. Lena is, inter alia, founding member of the German ‘Netzwerk Historische Grundwissenschaften’ (https://www.ahigw.de/nachwuchsnetzwerk/).