Dr Rachel Moss

Departmental Tutor

Biography

Dr Rachel E. Moss is a Departmental Tutor at the University of Oxford and Associate Professor of History at the University of Northampton. Prior to this, she studied for her PhD in Medieval Studies at the University of York before taking up a post as a Postdoctoral Researcher at l'Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne and then secured funding as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford. Her ‘superbly thought-through’ (Arthuriana) first book, Fatherhood and its Representations in Middle English Texts, was published by D.S. Brewer in September 2013.

Research interests

A specialist in late medieval English history and literature, Rachel has researched and written on family, gender, sexuality, gentry and mercantile societies, and literary culture. She is currently researching medievalism and the extreme right in both historical (Britain 1960s - 1980s) and contemporary (online, international) context. Rachel has recently secured a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Small Research Grant for work related to this theme, 'Medievalism, gender and politicised nostalgia in the British extreme right, 1962 – 1982'. In this project she is undertaking a systematic analysis of archival materials related to the inner workings of the British extreme right in a significant period of change for this political movement (1962 – 1982), and will establish the political, social and emotional reasons for their nostalgia for the medieval past.

Recent publications

Rachel E. Moss, ‘‘In this orchard, when you would be comforted’: Using garden spaces for familial intimacy and wellbeing in late medieval England’, in Mark Rothery, Siobhan Hyland, Paul Jackson (eds.), Well-Being Past and Present: The History and Contemporary Practice of a Cultural Phenomenon in Britain (Bloomsbury, September 2025).

Amy Burge and Rachel E. Moss, ‘The man behind the tan: Ken’s Trumpian Absurdity’, in Jo Coghlan, Lisa Hackett and Huw Nolan (eds.), The Barbie Phenomenon: Volume I: Gender, Identity, Race and Sexuality (Routledge, September 2025).

Rachel E. Moss, ‘Afterword; Afterwards’, in Basil Arnould Price, Jane Bonsall and Meagan Khoury (eds.), Medieval Mobilities: Gendered Bodies, Spaces and Movements (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023): 249-252.

Rachel E. Moss, ‘“Let Him Walk with You”: Telling Stories About Fifteenth-Century Men, and the Women they Left Behind’, Medieval Feminist Forum, 58:1 (2022): 128-145

Rachel E. Moss, ‘Teaching Medieval Chivalry in an Age of White Supremacy’, New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession, 3:2 (2022): 6-18.