Katie Bugyis, Medieval Studies
Katie Bugyis is a Ph.D. student in the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame. Her research focuses on the promotion and contestation of female religious authority in high to late medieval England. She is particularly interested in recovering the theologies developed in texts traditionally dismissed as works of hagiography. For her dissertation, she will focus on the life of the twelfth-century English hermitess and prioress, Christina of Markyate, and the various ways that her life has been authored and interpreted through the middle ages and into the early modern period.
Katie completed her B.A. in history at the University of Notre Dame, during which time she completed a research project on the trope of the honeybee in the writings of medieval female theologians, such as Hildegard of Bingen. Upon graduating, she attended Yale University’s Institute of Sacred Music and earned her M.A. in religion. There, she wrote a master’s thesis on female prophetic authority in Dante’s Commedia. She graduated from both institutions with highest honors and with numerous awards.
Katie is a recipient of the Notebaert Fellowship, the University’s top graduate fellowship. Through the generous support of the University, she has been able to give papers at several international and national conferences within her fields of medieval studies, religious studies, and church history, and to conduct original research at the British Library. She has been invited to participate in a Mellon Seminar on medieval subjectivities at Northwestern University in the summer of 2011. Her essay, “Through the Looking Glass: Reflections of Christ’s ‘trewe louers’ in Nicholas Love’s The Mirroure of the Blessede Life of Jesu Criste,” will be published in the forthcoming proceedings of a conference on mapping late medieval lives of Christ that she attended in Belfast, Northern Ireland in the summer of 2010.