I am a Lecturer in Visual Studies and Cultural Heritage in the Department of History of Art and a specialist in the art and visual culture of medieval England. Broadly, I am interested in the relationship between the visual arts and medieval religion, from the role of the role of images in the performance of the liturgy to the function of material culture in devotional practice. I also have a background in museums and curating and have worked on several major exhibitions, most recently Thomas Becket: Murder and the Making of a Saint at the British Museum and Making History: Church, State and Conflict at Canterbury Cathedral.

My forthcoming book, Imagining the Unimaginable: The Trinity in Medieval England, explores how medieval artists working in England wrestled with the paradoxical concept of a God that is one being and yet three, Father, Son and Spirit. It demonstrates how their attempts to visualise the ‘three-in-one’, to literally imagine the unimaginable, resulted in some of the most inventive and extraordinary images of the Middle Ages.

My next research project focuses on the making and meaning of medieval croziers, the sumptuous and highly-decorated staffs owned by bishops, abbots and abbesses across medieval Europe. Far from being passive signs of the ecclesiastical office, these objects in fact played a dynamic role in the socio-political life of their owner and were integral to the performance and articulation of power and status. Uniting the rich corpus of surviving croziers from medieval England with written sources about their use in diplomatic and liturgical contexts, this will be the first project to explore the complex meanings behind their function, imagery and materiality.

I have published on a range of topics, from illuminated manuscripts to the devotional life of Edward, the 'Black Prince'.

My recent article on the Trinitarian diagram known as the Shield of Faith can be found here:

Sophie Kelly, 'Est / Non Est: Crafting the Shield of Faith Trinity in Thirteenth-Century England', Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, vol. 10 no. 1, 2025, p. 116-148: https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mns.2025.a965558