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Marlene Schilling is a doctoral canditate in Medieval and Modern Languages, funded by the Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership Lincoln College Kingsgate Scholarship and the Clarendon Fund. Her research interests lie in medieval German devotional women's writings, with a special focus in Late Medieval prayer books written and produced in female religious houses. 

Marlene's DPhil project studies the poetics of medieval Northern German prayer books (written and used in female convents around 1500) by looking at the stylistic means of personifications of time used as a manifestation and a figure of reflexion for salvation. The project is placed at a fascinating intersection of poetics, theology and female devotion, shining light on a so far understudied corpus of late medieval manuscripts.

Marlene co-runs the Medieval Women's Writing Research Group, funded by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) Critical-Thinking Communities fund with Katherine Smith, hoping to bring together those working on pre-modern women's writing in other faculties and sub-faculties at Oxford and beyond. She is also an associated member at the projects "The Aesthetics of Combinatorics: Personifications and Allegories in Medieval Art and Literature" and "Precarious Appearance: Aesthetic Discourses in Mystical Texts of the Middle Ages" of the Collaborative Research Center 1391 Different Aesthetics, University of Tübingen (Germany). 

Education

Prior to starting her DPhil, Marlene obtained a BA in German Studies & Comparative Literature Studies and an MA in German Literature from the University of Tübingen (Germany) as well as an MSt in Modern Languages (German) from Brasenose College, University of Oxford.

Selection of Recent Conferences 
  • Co-Organization: Constellations – 2024 AHRC International Conference (with Lena Alfter, Cecily Fasham, Valentino Gargano and Giorgia Maffioli-Brigatti), September 2024
  • Golden Times: Personifications in Late Medieval Prayerbooks from Northern Germany, Leeds International Medieval Congress 2024 (01.-05.07.2024), July 2024
  • Co-Organization: Medieval Women’s Writing Research Group Conference 2024: Exchanging Words (with Katherine Smith, Santhia Velasco Kittlaus and Carolin Gluchwoski, funded by the TORCH Critical Thinking Communities fund), June 2024
  • Connected through Script – Personifications of time as a distinct form of devotion across Northern German Convents, Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference 2024, April 2024
  • A special form of devotion – personifications of time in late medieval prayer books from Northern Germany', Centre for Manuscript and Text Studies (The Queen’s College Oxford), Work in Progress Colloquium, February 2024
  • Zeitpersonifikationen in spätmittelalterlichen Gebetbüchern aus Norddeutschen Frauenklöstern, Medieval German Literature Research Seminar, University of Tübingen, December 2023
  • Defying distance – The rhetorical potential of personifications of time in the prayerbooks of the Northern German convent Medingen, Medieval and Modern Languages Graduate Network conference, University of Oxford, July 2023
  • Personifying Christ’s Birthday – The Personification of Christmas Eve in Middle Low German prayerbooks, Medieval & Early Modern Studies Summer Festival, University of Kent,  July 2023
  • Personifications of time and devotional community in the prayerbooks of the Northern German convent Medingen, Postgraduate Conference 2023: Identities, Communities and ‘Imagined Communities’, University of Bristol, April 2023
  • Salve nox auriflua: Personifications in the Prayerbooks from the Cistercian Convent of Medingen, Leeds International Medieval Congress 2022 (04.-07.07.2022),  July 2022
Academic Teaching

Paper IX | Medieval Literature (10/2023–06/2025).

Grammatikübung | German Grammar (10/2024–06/2025)

Paper IV | Historical Linguistics (10/2023–03/2024)

German Tutorial for the Oxford Programme for Undergraduate Studies (OPUS) | German Linguistics & Modern German Literature (10/2024–12/2024)