Staff profile

Koren received a BA (Hons) in English Studies, MA with distinction in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, and a PhD from Durham University. Her MA dissertation, ‘The Avian Spielraum: The Role and Function of Birds in Middle English Dream Visions and Debates’ and her PhD thesis, ‘Y slepe, and myn herte wakith’: Music and Visual Art in Middle English Dream Visions’, were supervised by Professors Neil Cartlidge and Corinne Saunders, respectively. Her research interests include dream poetry, philosophical allegory, medieval Neoplatonism, the history of ideas relating to the inner and outer senses (particularly practical and theoretical music theory, lyric, birdsong, polyphony, cosmic harmony, ekphrasis, perspectiva, darkness and illumination, and distortion), Macrobius, Alan of Lille, Bernardus Silvestris, Robert Grosseteste, Calcidius, Proclus, and Boethius.

In 2015 she was awarded a grant from the Durham University’s Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies to work as a research assistant for Dr David Brafman, Curator of Rare Books at The Getty Research Institute, on the exhibitions, The Cave Temples of Dunhuang: Buddhist Art on China’s Silk Road and The Art of Alchemy. She has also worked as art gallery assistant at CENTRAL BOOKING in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a writer and representative for Vellum magazine at Art Paris art fair, and more recently as an apprentice archivist in special collections at Ushaw College in Durham.

Recent Awards and Recognition

Durham University Faculty of Arts and Humanities Postgraduate Research Support Grant (2018)

David Brafman, ‘Dusting off Dunhuang: A History of Travelers on the Central Asian “Silk Roads”’, Cave Temples of Dunhuang: Buddhist Art on China’s Silk Road, Martha Agnew, Marcia Reed, Tevvy Ball (eds) (Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2016), pp. 87-109 [Acknowledgement]

Durham University Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies Research Grant (2014)

Editorial Assistant for Professor Elizabeth Archibald, Troy and the European Imagination 900-1700 (forthcoming), Durham University (2013-15)

Recent Publications

Kuntz, Koren, ‘Ekphrasis, Cognition and Multimodality in Le roman de la rose’, On the Fringes: Outsiders and Otherness in the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds, ed. Natalie Goodison and Alexander J. Wilson (Durham: Medieval and Early Modern Student Association, 2015), 15-44

------ ‘Loss and Restoration in the Apollonius of Tyre Narrative Cycle from Antiquity to the Renaissance’, Foundation, 6/1 (2014), 41-52