Dr Anya Burgon
- Affiliated Lecturer and Bye-Fellow in History of Art at Lucy Cavendish
About
I'm an Affiliated Lecturer in the Department and Bye-Fellow at Lucy Cavendish. Until October 2025 I was Schulman Research Fellow in the History of Art at Trinity Hall in Cambridge, and before that I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in an international interdisciplinary research group, the Centre for Medieval Literature, based at the University of York and Southern Denmark. In York I also taught within the Department of English and Related Literature. I completed my PhD at the History of Art Department in Cambridge under the supervision of Professor Paul Binski in 2019.
Research
My research explores the role of image, metaphor, and imagination in medieval education, theology, and contemplation, with a focus on the twelfth to fourteenth centuries and northern Europe. I'm interested in how medieval art and poetics did 'epistemic' work, solving problems and expressing complex (religious, scientific) ideas more successfully than logic or prose. My first monograph, based on my doctoral thesis, explores discussions of the crafts ('mechanical arts') and artificer in France and England in the twelfth to fifteenth centuries. Specifically it charts the changing relationship between 'mechanical' art and 'liberal' art in this period; ars was implicitly - sometimes explicitly - superior to scientia in many a medieval text. My new book project explores the history of the Stoic-ethical ideal of attaining a cosmic 'view from above' as it reappears in medieval contemplation, poetry, and the visual arts from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries.