Grace O'Duffy

I grew up by the banks of the River Ribble, the erstwhile boundary between the two northernmost of early England’s seven kingdoms. The medieval world has always ebbed and flowed close by my own, and my work ties past and present together. Vikings are famed in modern media for their history of raping and pillaging, but scholarly attention has not yet been focused on sexual violence in the literature of the medieval north. My first two monographs examine sexual violence in the Old Norse family and legendary sagas, respectively. A literary scholar by trade, my work is inevitably inextricable from legal, historical, archaeological and anthropological disciplines. My central concerns are to sift through the ever-shifting definitions of rape and its associated terms, and to unearth the myriad ways in which violence against women manifests in the literature of the far north. During my time at Harvard, I will also be working on my next book project, a holistic study of the role of rape in origin stories across the literary cultures connected by the North Atlantic: Old Norse, Old and Middle English, Anglo-Norman and Old French, as well as Celtic literatures. From epic poetry to Brut narratives, sexual violence is used as a narrative tool to forge personal, introspective, national, and mythic identities. My research will call attention to the persistence of rape as a central theme in core European foundational narratives and, in turn, speak to how rape is ingrained in Western culture.

I am co-founder of A.D.A.M. (Addressing Difficult Aspects of the Medieval), a network with the aim of providing support and resources for medieval scholars working on difficult, sensitive, or taboo topics.