Rose Albiston
PhD
English and Theatre Studies
Rose Albiston is an English and Theatre Studies PhD candidate looking at depictions of the deathbed across genres in late-medieval and early modern England.
Rose completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Melbourne before completing a Master of Studies in English (650-1550) at the University of Oxford. She has previously worked as an academic commissioning editor at Cambridge University Press and as a research assistant at La Trobe University. She was the 2025 recipient of the Lloyd Davis Memorial Prize awarded by the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association and is currently working as a Graduate Researcher Academic Associate.
Rose’s research is supported by the Shakespeare 400 PhD Scholarship.
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Thesis
‘Dead, yet speaking’: The Deathbed Scene and Genre in Late-Medieval and Early Modern Texts
The late-medieval and early modern focus on the deathbed as a space of extreme importance impacted their approaches to deathbed care. This thesis traces English textual representations of the deathbed scene across the late-medieval and early modern periods. Examining ars moriendi, deathbed accounts, poetry, broadside ballads, and theatre, this thesis is structured so as to explore texts in order of increasing fictionality. An analysis of texts from the centuries on either side of the Protestant Reformation considers how approaches to the deathbed were changed by this religious and social disruption.
Research interests
- Medieval and early modern English literature