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Nicholas Watson teaches in the English Department at Harvard University, where he is Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English. He is chair of the Standing Committee on Medieval Studies and a member of the Standing Committee on the Study of Religion. He is also Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, Member of the Princeton Institute of Advanced Study, and Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America.

His teaching covers the entire range of literatures in English, as well as the literatures of the European middle ages in English, French, Latin and Italian. His courses focus on form, genre and representation, writing by women, literary history, literary theory, literature and ethics, Christian mystical and visionary writing, medievalism, and historiography (the politics of how and why we understand the past). An active graduate advisor, he is co-convenor of the English Department's graduate Medieval Colloquium and the Race Before Race Seminar, a joint initiative of Medieval Studies and the Classics.

His research to date has several overlapping strands:

  • Mystical and visionary writing, especially by women, with an emphasis on late-medieval England and northern France and a secondary interest in texts of ritual magic.
  • The development of the sociolinguistic concept of the vernacular from the Carolingian period to the sixteenth-century reformations, including medieval theorizations of the nature and capacities of writings in vernacular languages and the changing character of vernacular textualities.
  • The history and character of Christian thought and writing in languages other than Latin, the official language of the western institutional Church, especially in Old English, insular French, and Middle English, from the Carolingian period to the sixteenth-century reformations
  • The history and historiography of the imaginary concept of the medieval and the historical and literary disciplines of medieval studies more broadly.

Author, editor, or co-editor of thirteen books and author or co-author of some sixty articles on these and related topics, he is best-known for his work on Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and John of Morigny and for the prominence he has given the term "vernacular theology."