Dr Juanita Ruys
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BA, PhD |
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Phone: +61 2 9351 4149 |
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Address: Room N346 |
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Email: juanita.ruys@sydney.edu.au |
Dr Juanita Feros Ruys is an ARC QEII Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Medieval Studies. She is an Associate Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies, co-ordinator of the NEER Research Cluster ‘Literary, Monastic, and Intellectual Culture in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Europe’, a member of the NEER Research Cluster ‘Latin’s Long Histories and Interdisciplinary Applications’ convened by Professor Yasmin Haskell, and a member of the University of Sydney English Department Research Cluster EMLAC (Early Modern Literature and Culture) convened by Dr Liam Semler. She completed a BA (Hons) 1 and PhD in the Department of English at the University of Sydney and held an ARC Australian Post-Doctoral Fellowship (APD) in the Centre for Medieval Studies (2003-2005).
Her QEII Fellowship, 2007-2011, is entitled ‘Learning from Life: The Creation of Experiential and Life-Long Learning in Europe in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods’. This project will draw together disparate histories of autobiographic individuality and devotional interiority in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, together with emerging discourses of scientific experiment and religious mysticism in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in order to show how the language and concept of experience became a key factor in late medieval intellectual culture. The project will particularly focus on the employment of experience in the didactic literature (literature of instruction) and therefore the pedagogic systems of the later Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. It will consider the translation of Latin ideas of experientia and experimentum into the various European vernaculars and will especially take account of gender considerations in the development and employment of ideas of experience in teaching environments.
Dr Ruys’s research interests include women’s Medieval Latin writings and their reception in the post-medieval period, medieval parent-child relationships, medieval didactic literature and especially parent-child advice-texts, the autobiographical impulse in the medieval and early modern periods, and the changing epistemology of experience in the medieval and early modern periods.
She is editor of the volume What Nature Does Not Teach: Didactic Literature in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, Disputatio, 15 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008 forthcoming). She is co-editor with Yasmin A. Haskell of Latinity and Alterity in the Early Modern Period (Tucson, AZ: ACMRS, 2008 forthcoming), and co-editor with Louise D’Arcens of Maistresse of My Wit: Medieval Women, Modern Scholars, Making the Middle Ages, 7 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004). She has published numerous book chapters and journal articles on aspects of Medieval Latin literature, especially the writings of Heloise and Abelard, including recently ‘Ut sexu sic animo: The Resolution of Sex and Gender in the Planctus of Abelard’, Medium Ævum, 75 (2006), 1-23, and the article on Heloise in the Oxford University Press Encyclopedia of Women in World History (2008). With John O. Ward she is completing a study, edition and translation of Abelard’s late poetic writings entitled The Repentant Abelard: A Study of Abelard’s Thought as Revealed in his Carmen ad Astralabium and Planctus, The New Middle Ages