Lydia Shahan is a PhD candidate in the Committee on the Study of Religion, with a secondary field in Medieval Studies. She studies the history of Christianity in medieval Europe, focusing primarily on mystical and devotional literature. Broadly speaking, her research considers how norms of gender, sexuality, and race were both constructed and transgressed in medieval religious texts and communities. Her dissertation project pursues these questions through a study of the Virgin Mary in mystical texts from the medieval Low Countries c. 1250-1550. Related research and teaching interests include saints and hagiography, ecstatic and visionary experiences, form, genre, and poetics of mystical texts, and Middle Dutch spiritual literature. She is also interested in how medieval religious texts and practices are instrumentalized in twentieth and twenty-first century feminist thought, queer theory, and theories of race and racialization. In 2024-2025, Lydia is a Visiting Research Student at the Ruusbroec Institute, University of Antwerp, in Antwerp, Belgium, supported by a Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Merit Research Fellowship.
Lydia holds a BA in Medieval History from Kenyon College, and a Research MA in Theology and Religion from the KU Leuven in Leuven, Belgium. At Harvard, she has served as Harvard Divinity School Teaching Fellow Liaison, Program Assistant in Medieval Studies, Faculty of Arts and Sciences Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Fellow, and as co-convenor of the Premodern Race Seminar and the Medieval Graduate Interdisciplinary Workshop. Outside of Harvard, she is a former Chair of the Vagantes Graduate Conference on Medieval Studies, and a co-convenor of the Mystical Theology Network, an international research network of scholars working on mystical texts. Her work has been supported by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Research Foundation Flanders and her research has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as Comitatus, Louvain Studies, Ons Geestelijk Erf, and in several edited collections.