Participants

Steering Group Members

Rachel Hammersley
Project PI
Professor of Intellectual History, Newcastle University

Workshop 1 Speakers

Dr Delphine Doucet (Sunderland University)

Delphine Doucet’s research focuses on the political and religious thought of the early modern period. In particular, she is interested in the development of theories of toleration and discourses about the relationship between Church and State in the post-Reformation period. She also researches the evolution and role of heterodox ideas in the early modern period through the circulation and reception of clandestine manuscripts in Europe. These two areas interlink when considering the ways in which heterodox thought challenged traditional religious and political institutions. She has further interests in republican thought and the notion of civil religion in the early modern period.

Dr Tim Somers (Newcastle University)

BA postdoctoral fellow at Newcastle. Recent work includes: ‘Jesting Culture and Religious Politics in 17th c. England’, in Historical Research; and Ephemeral Print Culture with Boydell & Brewer.

Harriet Palin (Newcastle University)

Harriet Anne Palin is a third-year doctoral candidate at Newcastle University. Her work considers the relationships between different media of religious education, namely catechism, prayer, preaching and psalm-singing. Harriet’s work has a highly interdisciplinary focus, especially collaborating with musicians in reconstructing metrical catechisms. Harriet is part of the Reading Primers Special Interest Group at the University of Augsburg and has worked with them to consider adult shame and embarrassment in early modern education. Harriet has also presented her research to the International John Bunyan Society, most recently in 2022 on nonconformist catechesis and expounding religious literature in dissenter culture.

Dr Niall Allsopp (University of Exeter)

Niall Allsopp has been a lecturer in English at the University of Exeter since 2018. His first monograph, Poetry and Sovereignty in the English Revolution, was published in 2020 by Oxford University Press, and included chapters on Andrew Marvell, Margaret Cavendish, and William Davenant. His bibliography on ‘Literature and the English Civil Wars’ was published in Oxford Bibliographies Online in 2021 and will hopefully be a useful resource for researchers, teachers, and students. He is currently Co-Investigator on the Leverhulme funded project ‘ReConEx: Writing Religious Conflict and Community in Exeter, 1550-1700’. He is conducting research into various forms of writing from mid-seventeenth century Exeter: civil war preaching, Robert Herrick, manuscript poetry, and the book trade. His essay on threshold rituals in Herrick won the Review of English Studies essay prize in 2017. He is currently developing a broader project on rites and ceremonies in mid-seventeenth century literature.

Professor Martin Dzelzainis (University of Leicester)

Martin Dzelzainis is Emeritus Professor of Renaissance Literature and Thought at the University of Leicester. He is currently editing Marvell’s prose and poetry for the Oxford 21st-century Oxford Authors series and Milton’s histories for The Complete Works of John Milton. With Dr Paul Seaward (Director, History of Parliament), he is general editor of The Works of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, as well as contributing editor of the Miscellaneous Essays volume. All these are for Oxford University Press. He has previously edited Milton’s Political Writings (CUP, 1991), Marvell and Liberty, with Warren Chernak (Macmillan, 1999), The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, volume 1, with Annabel Patterson (Yale, 2003), The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell, with Edward Holberton (OUP, 2019).

Dr Thomas Whitfield (Georgian Group)

Thomas Whitfield is the Georgian Group’s Conservation Adviser for Northern England, responsible for the care and preservation of Georgian built heritage (1700-1840). Prior to this he worked as an archaeologist in the commercial archaeology sector on diverse projects around the UK. He was awarded his AHRC-funded PhD in historical archaeology by Newcastle University in 2021, for a thesis titled ‘Liberty, Property, Materiality; An Historical Archaeology of Protest and Resistance in Later-Eighteenth-Century England.’ The content for this paper is drawn from a chapter of the thesis which explored the diverse and multi-media nature of Thomas Spence’s political propaganda. Other chapters explored the landscapes and material culture of the Wilkes and Liberty Movement, the radical political townscape of 1770s Newcastle upon Tyne, and the making of ‘Marsden Grotto’ as an expression of resistance of landlordism.

Midway through his PhD Thomas was awarded a research fellowship from the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation to explore the dissemination and expression of political ideas in pre-revolutionary Virginia. One day he hopes to get round to writing this up as an article. His research interests include historical and landscape archaeology, material culture studies, and, lately, architectural history and historic buildings conservation.

Dr Tiago Sousa Garcia (Newcastle University)

Tiago Sousa Garcia is an early modernist and digital humanist, currently working as a software research engineer at Newcastle University. His early modern research focuses on translations from the vernacular into English in the mid seventeenth century. As a researcher for ATNU (Animating Text Newcastle University) he has helped to develop new digital approaches to research in textual studies across disciplines and time periods. He is a co-editor of the journal of the TEI and a collaborator for The Programming Historian.

Dr Gaby Mahlberg (Newcastle University)

Gaby Mahlberg is a historian and journalist currently based in London. Her research focuses on seventeenth-century English republican thought in its wider European context and print culture more broadly. She is the author of Henry Neville and English Republican Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Manchester University Press, 2009) and The English Republican Exiles in Europe during the Restoration (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Together with Dirk Wiemann, she has edited two volumes on European Contexts for English Republicanism (Ashgate 2013) and Perspectives on English Revolutionary Republicanism (Ashgate, 2014); with Cesare Cuttica she has edited Patriarchal Moments (Bloomsbury, 2016). She currently holds a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship to research ‘English Republican Ideas and Translation Networks in Early Modern German, c.1640-1848’ at Newcastle University, and together with Thomas Munck she is editing a collection entitled ‘Ideas across borders: translating visions of authority and civil society in Europe, c.1600-1840’, to be published with Routledge.

Dr Myriam-Isabelle Ducrocq (University of Paris, Nanterre)

Myriam-Isabelle Ducrocq is Senior Lecturer at the University of Paris Nanterre where she teaches English history, civilisation and law. Her research has focused on the history of early modern and modern political thought with a particular interest in constitutional debates from the seventeenth century to the contemporary era. She has become interested in English republicanism and the circulation throughout the European continent of English republican ideas (popular sovereignty, the balance of power, democracy, citizenship, agrarian laws …) notably in translation, which is the topic of her forthcoming book: La République de James Harrington dans la France des Lumières et de la Révolution (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment). She has also translated early modern texts of political thought including Of the Interest of Princes and States (1680) by Slingsby Bethel (Presses Universities de France, 2002) and The History of the Reign of Henry VII (1622) by Francis Bacon (with Nicolas Dubos and Guillaume Navaud, Classiques Garnier, forthcoming).

Professor Mark Towsey (University of Liverpool)

Mark Towsey is Professor of the History of the Book and Head of the Department of History at the University of Liverpool. He has published very widely on the history of reading, libraries and intellectual culture in the long eighteenth century, including Reading the Scottish Enlightenment (Leiden: Brill, 2010), Before the Public Library: Reading Community and Identity in the Atlantic World, 1650-1850 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), Reading History in Britain and America, c.1750-c.1840 (Cambridge University Press, 2019), The First Minute Book of the Liverpool Athenaeum, 1797-1809 (Liverpool: The Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 2020) and The Minute Book of the Bristol Library Society, 1772-1801 (Bristol: Bristol Record Society, 2022). He has previously held a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship and the Bibliographical Society of America’s Katharine Pantzer Senior Fellowship in Bibliography and the British Book Trades, in addition to visiting fellowships at Harvard, Yale and the Huntington Library.

Dr Max Skjönsberg (University of Cambridge)

Max Skjönsberg is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge, having previously been a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Liverpool, and a lecturer in history and politics at the University of St Andrews and the University of York. He is the author of The Persistence of Party: Ideas of Harmonious Discord in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Workshop 2 Speakers

Rachel Foxley (University of Reading)

Rachel Foxley works on radical and republican thought in the English Revolution. Her monograph The Levellers appeared in 2013. Her current work focuses on the English republicans of the seventeenth century and their engagements with ‘democracy’ and issues of hierarchy and gender. She is Associate Professor at the University of Reading.

Sophie Smith (University of Oxford)

Marcus Nevitt (University of Sheffield)

Charlotte McCallum (Queen Mary, University of London)

Charlotte McCallum has just completed a PhD at QMUL studying the publication and dissemination of Machiavelli’s works in English. Her work lies at the intersection of the history of the book, translation studies and intellectual history.

Katherine Hunt (University of East Anglia)

Katherine Hunt is a Lecturer in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Literature at the University of East Anglia, and works on the literature and material culture of England, Europe, and the wider world. Her current research, focussed on brass and bronze in Renaissance writing, draws from the histories of art and science to ask how the material and the artisanal—matter and labour—inform early-modern literary production. She is interested in how investigating making, process, and experience can help us be better readers of premodern texts.

Edward Jones Correda

Marie-Louise Coolahan (University of Galway)

Marie-Louise Coolahan is a professor of English at the University of Galway. She works on early modern women’s writing, early modern Ireland, book ownership and the history of reading. She is the author of Women, Writing, and Language in Early Modern Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2010); edited ‘The Cultural Dynamics of Reception’, a special issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (2020); and is co-editor (with Gillian Wright) of Katherine Philips: Form, Reception, and Literary Contexts (Routledge, 2018). She is the Principal Investigator of RECIRC: The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing, 1550-1700, funded by the European Research Council (https://recirc.universityofgalway.ie).

Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (King’s College, University of London)

Jason McElligott (Marsh Library, Dublin)

Jason McElligott is the Director of Marsh’s Library, Dublin (founded 1707). He was educated at University College Dublin and St John’s College, Cambridge. A former ‘J.P.R Lyell Research Fellow in the History of the Early Modern Book’ at Merton College, Oxford, he is currently researching book theft in 18th century Dublin and the influence on Bram Stoker’s novels of his fascination with 17th century books and pamphlets.

Joseph Hone (Newcastle University)

Joseph Hone is an Academic Track Fellow in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University. He is the author of three books, the most recent of which is Alexander Pope in the Making (2021), and of eighteen articles spanning the fields of literary studies, bibliography, and the history of political thought. His second book, The Paper Chase, was longlisted for the HWA Non-Fiction Crown. He is co-editing the major early poems for The Oxford Edition of the Writings of Alexander Pope and, with Pat Rogers, a volume of forty-five essays on Jonathan Swift in Context. He is currently preparing a substantial revisionist work on the underground book trade in early eighteenth-century England for Princeton University Press.

Leanne Smith (Newcastle University)

Leanne Smith is a third-year Northern Bridge funded PhD student at Newcastle University. Her research focuses on the intellectual thought of the seventeenth-century sect the Fifth Monarchy Men. She is particularly interested in exploring the connection between millenarianism and republicanism during the period. Leanne is also a Communications Officer for the Northern Early Modern Network.

Alex Plane (Newcastle University)

Alex Plane is a librarian and PhD student supervised jointly at Newcastle University and the National Library of Scotland, funded by an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award. Her research aims to reconstruct the libraries of King James VI and I. Identifying his books, establishing their use, and exploring their bindings, her work situates his royal libraries in the context of both Scottish and English book culture. By tracing the content and extent of James’ libraries throughout his reigns, it offers an important window onto the intellectual life and networks of this most scholarly of British monarchs.

Harriet Gray (Newcastle University)

Harriet Gray is a PhD student at Newcastle University considering Intellectual Life at Newcastle’s Literary and Philosophical Society, 1793-1825. Her project is centred around a body of archives documenting the administration and intellectual activity of the Lit & Phil from its foundation. The archives consist of minutes, reports, correspondence, lectures and papers read at monthly meetings, and other miscellaneous items. The project aims to catalogue the archives whilst bringing out the significance of the archive’s contents to the intellectual culture and heritage of Newcastle and beyond. Her research interests lie predominantly in intellectual and literary institutions in Britain and the Anglophone world, with other interests in cultural and social history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the history of the book and reading.

Workshop 3 Speakers

Abigail Williams (University of Oxford)

Abigail Williams is Professor of Eighteenth Century Culture at St Peter’s College, University of Oxford. Her recent work in The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home (Yale, 2017) has focussed on the history of reading, and especially the practice of sociable reading in eighteenth-century homes. She has just completed a book on misreading, thinking about the ways in which ideas of the ‘good’ reader have affected our approaches to literature. This will be published as Reading it Wrong with Princeton University Press in 2023. She edited Jonathan Swift’s Journal to Stella for Cambridge University Press (2013), and is the author of Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture (2005). Other publications focus on miniature books, the idea of happiness, art and violence, and embodiment in letters. From 2010-2016 she led a large-scale digital humanities research project, the Digital Miscellanies Index, and she is currently working on an ed tech project using AI to create interactive experiences with literary texts. She is the Associate Head for Research and Innovation in Humanities at the University of Oxford, alongside writing and presenting for BBC Radio 4, including the recent series I Feel Therefore I Am (2023) and Pride or Prejudice: How We Read Now (2022).

John Craig (Simon Fraser University, Canada)

John Craig is Professor of Early Modern English History at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. He is currently serving as Chair of the Executive Board for the international project Records of Early English Drama (REED) and is the historical consultant for the East Anglian collections. Among other projects, he is currently writing The English Reformation by the Book, a study of parochial book purchase with an accompanying database, Books in English Parish Churches, which aims to bring together all the parochial evidence of the purchase, possession and use of printed texts in English parishes from 1536 to 1642.

Giles Bergel (University of Oxford)

Giles Bergel is Senior Researcher in Digital Humanities in the Department of Engineering Science in the University of Oxford. A book historian by training, his research interests include the application of computer vision to the study of print; digital textual editing; and the history of the book trades. He is the editor of a digital edition of the ballad The Wandering Jew’s Chronicle; co-editor of Stationers’ Register Online; and was co-creator of Bodleian Ballads Online. He has recently been working on Scottish chapbooks in collaboration with the National Library of Scotland and on the AHRC-funded Envisioning Dante project.

Jennifer Orr (Newcastle University)

Jennifer Orr is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature at Newcastle University. She is Vice President of the British Association Romantic Studies (BARS) and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She has contributed a major revisionist study of Irish and Scottish Literature in Literary Networks and Dissenting Print Culture (Palgrave, 2015) and is a scholarly editor of literary correspondence (Fostering an Irish Writers’ Circle: the correspondence of Samuel Thomson 1766-1816, Dublin 2012). Her current projectTransatlantic Networks 1800-1845 is building a digital ‘who’s who’ of Romantic transatlantic correspondence.

Ruth Ahnert (Queen Mary, University of London)

Ruth Ahnert is Professor of Literary History and Digital Humanities at Queen Mary University of London. Her work focuses on Tudor culture, book history, and digital humanities. She is author of The Rise of Prison Literature in the Sixteenth Century (2013), and co-author of The Network Turn: Changing Perspectives in the Humanities (2020), Collaborative Historical Research in the Age of Big Data (2023), and Tudor Networks of Power (forthcoming later this year). Recent collaborative work has taken place through AHRC-funded projects ‘Living with Machines’ and ‘Networking the Archives: Assembling and analysing a meta-archive of correspondence, 1509-1714’. With Elaine Treharne she is series editor of Stanford University Press’s Text Technologies series.

Paul Gooding (University of Glasgow)

Dr. Paul Gooding is a Senior Lecturer in Information Studies at the University of Glasgow. His research focuses on evaluating the impact of digital library collections on institutions and users, and how library and archival collections can be harnessed for innovative reuse in the Digital Humanities. He is particularly interested in the interaction between mass digitisation techniques, digital materiality, user behaviour, and legal/institutional frameworks for collection development. His major publications include Historic Newspapers in the Digital Age: “Search All About It!” (Routledge, 2016), and Electronic Legal Deposit: Shaping the Library Collections of the Future (Facet Publishing, 2020). Paul has led AHRC-funded projects including Digital Library Futures, which investigates the impact of non-print legal deposit upon legal deposit libraries in the United Kingdom, and the Network to Investigate the Development of a Global Dataset of Digitised Texts.

Yann Ryan (Leiden University)

Yann Ryan is a lecturer in digital humanities at Leiden University, having previously held postdoctoral roles at Queen Mary, University of London and the University of Helsinki. His research interests include computational approaches to early modern news culture and the history of the book.

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