Watts, Dr Cat

Academic background

Cat Watts holds a PhD in French from Newnham College, Cambridge and completed her teaching and research training at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon as a lectrice.

Teaching

Cat welcomes enquiries for tutorials or outreach teaching relating to any of her research interests at any level of study from Year 6 to MPhil.

Research interests

Cat Watts sets the medieval and the modern in dialogue, suggesting formal similarities between medieval vernacular literature and modern pop culture, and bringing out shared experiences of love, devotion and passion. She works with queer studies, post-colonial studies, and theories of time and space to sketch dynamic transtemporal networks of storytelling.

Her fields of interest include:

• French Arthurian verse and prose romance and pastiche
• French devotional literature, art, and objects
• The history of anglophone fandom
• Fandom literature
• The history of American comics
• Literary and visual art in videogames
• Queer studies
• Theories of space and time, especially in relation to literary spaces and to globalisation
• Theories of authorship
• Manuscript ontology and materiality

Recent Publications

Cat Watts is currently finalising her first book project, Miraculous Hurt/Comfort in Medieval Fanfiction and Modern Devotion, to be published in the Impact series at ARC Humanities Press.

Watts, Cat, ‘La Mort le Roi Artu’, The Literary Encyclopedia, 1.5.2.01 (2025) <https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=41137>

Watts, Cat, ‘Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt, eds., Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography’, Medium Aevum, 91.2 (2022), p. 386 [review]

Watts, Cat, ‘Alice Hazard, The Face and Faciality in Medieval French Literature, 1170-1390’, Medium Aevum, 91.1 (2022), pp. 152-54 [review]

Watts, Cat, ‘Artus de Bretagne by Christine Ferlampin-Acher (review)’, French Studies, 76.3 (2022), pp. 454-55 [review]

Watts, Cat, ‘Janice Pinder, The Abbaye du Saint Esprit: Spiritual Instruction for Laywomen, 1250-1500’, Medium Aevum, 90.2 (2021), pp. 360-61 [review]

McLeod, Liam & Cat Watts, ‘Medievalisms, Magic, and Macula: Encountering the medieval and the modern in Asobo Studio’s A Plague Tale: Innocence’, in The Medieval in Modern Games: Conference Proceedings Vol. 1, ed. by Robert Houghton (2020