Professor Diane Watt

Diane Watt is Professor of Medieval English Literature and Co-Director of SGS (the Sex, Gender and Sexualities Research Centre) at the University of Surrey. She has published several books about medieval women’s writing and gender and sexuality, including Secretaries of God  (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997), Amoral Gower (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), Medieval Women’s Writing (Cambridge: Polity, 2007) and Women, Writing and Religion in England and Beyond, 650-1100 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). In 2004 she published an edition of the selected letters of the Paston women (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer). Her edited and co-edited collections include Women and Medieval Literary Culture from the Early Middle Ages to the Fifteenth Century, jointly edited with Corinne Saunders (Cambridge: CUP, 2023), which won a CHOICE award for outstanding academic titles in 2024.  With Liz Herbert McAvoy and Michelle M. Sauer, she is joint Editor-in-Chief of The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Medieval Women's Writing in the Global Middle Ages. While at the OCLW, she completed a biography of Margaret Paston, entitled God’s Own Gentlewoman, which was published by Icon Books in 2024.