Lily Stewart (PhD Northwestern, Department of Religious Studies, 2022) is a visiting assistant professor in the Departments of Religious Studies. She teaches in the areas of premodern religion, literature, and the medical humanities. Her research centers on the role of leprosy--both as a disease of the body and as a cultural hermeneutic--in shaping and complicating medieval Christian ideas of selfhood, embodiment, community, and sanctity. Dr. Stewart’s dissertation, “The Holy Malady: Leprosy, Identity, and the Anatomy of a Medieval Stereotype,” explores twelfth- to fifteenth-century literary representations of leprosy as a form of earthly purgatory, arguing that the disease’s primary textual function was to serve as a vehicle towards salvation. Dr. Stewart’s approach to research and teaching strongly centers on interdisciplinary engagement, and she is particularly interested in blurring boundaries between the Humanities and STEM.
