Fellow and Director of Development

Telephone: 01223 765187
E-mail: Saskia.MurkJansen@pet.cam.ac.uk

Saskia Murk Jansen joined Peterhouse as Development Director in January 2011. Before that she was at Robinson College where she had been a British Academy Research Fellow and Graduate Tutor after completing her PhD at Newnham. Her academic field is Medieval Theology, particularly the writings in European vernaculars of lay women known as Beguines.  For some time she has combined her academic interest with policy and development work.  At the end of her Research Fellowship she joined the Cambridge University Development Office working on Alumni Relations and as the Cambridge-based Administrator of the American Friends of Cambridge University.  She then worked in London as the Policy Adviser to the Prime Minister's Special Adviser on Education focussing on the development of the Academy Schools' programme, the improvement of science education in state schools, and raising the educational performance of children in care. Immediately prior to joining Peterhouse she worked on a public-facing sustainability project for HRH The Prince of Wales, establishing the policy parameters and raising the corporate finance to put on a 12-day festival in central London in September 2010.

Publications

'Hadewijch and Eckhart: Amor intellegere est', in Meister Eckhart and Beguine Mystics (Continuum, New York, 1994)

'The use of gender and gender related imagery in Hadewijch', in Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages (Florida University Press, 1995)

Brides in the Desert: The Spirituality of the Beguines (Darton, Longman, and Todd, London, 1998)

Hadewijch, in Medieval Holy Women in the Christian Tradition (Brepols, Turnhout, 2010)