Alison

Hi there! My name is Alison Tara Walker and I am the Postdoctoral Research Fellow for the T-PEN project.

I'll be working on the project remotely from my home in Seattle, where I moved after completing a Ph.D. in English at UCLA. My doctoral dissertation, Politics, Patronage, and Orthodoxy in Late Medieval England argues that patronizing orthodox spirituality became an effective political gambit for the Lancastrian family, helping to stabilize an incipient dynasty by establishing its own spiritual legitimacy, in a time when the English church was also under siege. In addition to studying the literary culture of medieval England, my research also pays particular attention to the digital humanities, manuscript studies, and paleography.

I've also worked on a number of other digital humanities projects with a medieval bent, including the Digital Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library and UCLA's Digital Canon Law Project.

During my tenure with the T-PEN project, I will be testing its functionality while I prepare an edition of a lovely Middle English miscellany (Cambridge, Harvard University, Houghton MS Eng 530), once thought to have been written by John Shirley. This project is sure to test my paleographical chops, as the manuscript has no less than 6 scribes and is around 200 folios in length!