Ruth Abbott (English)

I work on the manuscripts and compositional practices of 17th, 18th, and 19th century writers, particularly poets; I am currently completing a book on William Wordsworth’s notebooks. At the moment I am particularly interested in the relations between compositional practices, metrical practices, and reading practices, especially the practice of reading aloud.

Gavin Alexander (English)

I teach palaeography for the MPhil in Medieval and Renaissance Literature in the Faculty of English, and in my own work try to bring perspectives from textual studies to bear on the job of literary criticism. My publications include a study of the literary response to Sir Philip Sidney (Writing After Sidney, 2006), in which the materials, make-up, and appearance of especially manuscript texts are often a part of what is interpreted. I am currently working on an edition of a newly-discovered Elizabethan manuscript treatise on poetics for CUP, and an edition of ‘Caelica’ and shorter poems for the Oxford Greville.

Debby Banham (Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic; History and Philosophy of Science)

My chief research interests are in medicine, diet and food production in Anglo-Saxon England, with an on-going sideline in monastic sign language. I’m currently finishing a book (with Dr Ros Faith) on Anglo-Saxon farming. Other projects include an analysis of the materia medica of Old English medical texts and a transcription and description of BL Sloane 1621, an eleventh-century Latin medical text at least partly written at Bury St Edmunds.

Richard Beadle (English)

I am currently (with others) working on a Handlist of Middle English Prose volume to be devoted to the manuscripts at St John’s and Magdalene Colleges, Cambridge. A future project may be a new descriptive catalogue of the medieval and early modern manuscripts at St John’s.

Richard Beadle was co-editor, with Colin Burrow, of English Manuscript Studies 16 (2011), a volume of essays arising out of a Scriptorium conference in Cambridge.

Joanna Bellis (English)

I am currently the Harry F. Guggenheim junior research fellow at Pembroke College, where I am working on a book for CUP provisionally entitled The Word in the Sword: Writing the Hundred Years War, 1337-1600, based on the PhD for which I studied with Andrew Zurcher. I have recently completed a critical edition of John Page’s eyewitness poem, The Siege of Rouen, an account of Henry V’s capture of Normandy’s capital in 1418. I am currently organising a conference on the theme of ‘Representing War and Violence in the Pre-Modern World’, taking in Pembroke on 23th-24th September 2013 (see http://www.pem.cam.ac.uk/conferences-catering/representing-war-conference/). My main research interests are: the idea of ‘writing history’ in the medieval and early modern period; etymology and MedRen language theory (from Isidore and Augustine to the Inkhorn Controversy); the materiality of texts and language, within a pre-structuralist understanding of words, meaning, and the book of nature; the material context of historical writing (chronicles, and the poetry embedded in them); the ways in which early modern writers imagined and used their medieval past; the status and self-presentation of eyewitness accounts of war and atrocity; the mutual conceptualisations of scribes and authors in medieval manuscripts.

Katie Birkwood (Royal College of Physicians)

I am a librarian, particularly interested in special collections and outreach, and am currently Rare Books and Special Collections Librarian at the Royal College of Physicians. My personal research interests lie in the history of library usage, so far specifically in seventeenth-century use of the manuscript library of Sir Robert Cotton. I am hoping to mount a major exhibition at the Royal College of Physicians concerning John Dee (the RCP holds the largest known extant collection of his books) and warmly welcome suggestions of possible collaborations.

Patricia Pires Boulhosa (Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic)

I am a historian of the mediaeval history of Scandinavia, with a special interest in the Icelandic laws of the thirteenth century – a period when Icelanders made major changes in their legal system, including the change from a kingless people to subjects of the Norwegian king. My analysis of the legal material aims to contextualize it within social, economic and historical circumstances, and also within its immediate material circumstance: the manuscript. My objective is to understand the laws in this immediate material context and within the interpretative context of scribes and their readers.

My current research involves the analysis of the layout of legal manuscripts, in order to throw light on the making of the manuscripts themselves, and the connections between layout and textual structure, as well as between the textual arrangement of the text and the legal content of the manuscript.

Rachel Bower (English)

I am interested in the way in which historical and political contexts shape the material texts available to readers, particularly in relation to anglophone world literature. I am particularly interested in the current horizons around Arab women publishing in Britain (and globally), especially in relation to publishers’ constraints on cover images, marketing of literary texts as non-fiction and autobiography, the predominance of the circulation of a particular genre (realist/ autobiographical/ confessional) and the constraints on literary form attached to this.

My doctoral research focuses on epistolarity and encounter in the late twentieth-century novel, and this includes an examination of the way in which material texts are represented through literary texts and the hermeneutic possibilities this offers in re-thinking the past. I am also the co-convener of the Postcolonial Institutions and Historiographies group at CRASSH, which currently focuses on archives and museums.

Katherine Bowers (Slavonic Studies)

I am a Research Associate attached to the project “Information Technologies in Russia, 1450-1850.” With Prof. Simon Franklin, I work on mapping out and analysing the various early modern information technologies, looking beyond the print revolution for a fuller picture of their shifting interrelationships and functionalities. My particular area of specialisation is eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian literature and culture. In addition to my work on the project, I also am interested in the rise and spread of popular fiction in Russian reading culture; in particular the influence of the eighteenth-century European Gothic novel on Russian Realism was the topic of my doctoral thesis.

Elizabeth Boyle (Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic)

My research interests centre on the reception of European learning and literary culture in Ireland, particularly in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. I am currently working on vernacular Irish responses to the Berengarian controversies regarding the Eucharist. More widely, I am interested in the way that Latin learning was translated and adapted into the vernacular (especially Irish) during the middle ages, and in the transmission of theological and philosophical texts between Ireland, England and Continental Europe. My secondary research interest is the history of scholarship in the nineteenth century, and in this connection I am currently working on the Celtic scholar and colonial jurist Whitley Stokes (1830-1909), and his involvement with members of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

Abigail Brundin (Italian)

I’m working on a project called ‘Rewriting Trent: the practice of poetry in Counter Reformation Florence’. I’ll be looking in particular at academies and their oral and scribal practices in relation to the various indexes after 1560.

See our ‘Projects’ page for details of the National Trust libraries pilot, for which Abigail is Principal Investigator.

Christopher Burlinson (English)

I have worked on Edmund Spenser (and have edited, with Andrew Zurcher, a collection of his letters and other papers), and am interested in the manuscript circulation of poetry in the early seventeenth century, in particular in the context of the universities and other institutions of the day. My research aims to place our understanding of poetic manuscript communities in relation to other kinds of manuscript use at those institutions, and also to enrich it through a study of the physical production and use of the paper book in those places (through stationers, binders, and so on).

I am currently working on Richard Corbett (1582-1635), who interests me because of his involvement in many early seventeenth century manuscript networks (and the sheer number of copies of his texts in manuscript miscellanies and collections), but also because many of his poems take as their subjects the very institutions (e.g. university life) and structures (e.g. patronage) within which they were written and transmitted.

Aisling Byrne (English)

My PhD thesis is supervised by Professor Helen Cooper and explores the idea of ‘otherworlds’ in medieval literatures from Britain and Ireland. I’m interested in textual transmission between the different linguistic and cultural traditions of Britain and Ireland and in how far manuscript contexts may illuminate the local reception of medieval texts. I am currently doing some work on two romances translated from English into Irish by the 15th-century Irish scribe Uilliam Mac an Legha.

Sarah Cain (English)

Sarah Cain is College Lecturer and Director of Studies in English. Her research interests include Anglo-American modernism, the history of modern aesthetics and literary theory, and the intersections between intellectual history and material culture.

Melissa Calaresu (History)

Melissa Calaresu is a lecturer in history at Gonville and Caius College. She is writing a cultural history of the Neapolitan enlightenment which has grown out of earlier interests in the political thought of late eighteenth-century Naples and has combined this with newer interests on the material culture and material interests of the European enlightenment. Her recent research includes the history of ice and ice-cream in eighteenth-century Italy which explores some of the recent paradigms of enlightenment historiography, and this, in turn, has led to research on the representation and realities of food hawkers in early modern Europe.  She has written articles on historical and autobiographical writing in the eighteenth century, the Grand Tour, the representation of urban space in the early modern period, and on the public sphere and political reform in Naples.  She is co-editor of Exploring cultural history: Essays in honour of Peter Burke (2010).

In 2011 Melissa was one of the convenors of the CMT conference ‘Eating Words’

Stefano Castelvecchi (Music)

Most of my work as a musicologist has focused on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century opera. I have been long involved with philology, as I published critical editions within the series dedicated to the works of Rossini and Verdi, collaborated in other ways to the editorial work of those series, and published brief contributions to the theory of opera editing. I hope to return soon to the study of the compositional sketches of Anton Webern (1883-1945).

Mark Chinca (German)

My current research is on the art of dying well in late medieval and early modern Europe. The principal concern is to investigate the persistence and mutations of a cultural paradigm that I call “dying by the book”: the regulation and management of the last hour of life according to precepts and scripts that are transmitted by, and learned from, books.

Jean Chothia (English)

I have edited a number of plays – 1930s redical texts for the old Nottingham Drama Texts series; 1890s/1900s emancipated women plays for OUP; Shaw’s Saint Joan for New Mermaids; James’s ‘The Outcry’ for the big CUP James project. I am interested in the shifts between the performed plays and the various published versions.

Jo Craigwood (English)

I work on literature and diplomacy in early modern England. This has led me to consider (among other things) diplomatic agency in the international circulation of books, manuscripts, and literary news.

Richard Dance (Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic)

My main interests are in the language and style of Old and Middle English literary texts, and in etymology and language contact. Amongst other things I have written about ‘The Battle of Maldon’, Wulfstan and ‘Ancrene Wisse’, and am currently working on the words derived from Old Norse in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Sophie Defrance (History and Philosophy of Science)

I am currently a Research Associate with the Darwin Correspondence Project. My research interests include historical bibliography, the history of books and reading, history of science, and nineteenth century studies. My PhD focused on textbooks and school books for girls in secondary education at the end of the nineteenth century, and I am currently working on articles on the subject.

Hildegard Diemberger (Archaeology and Anthropology)

I am a social anthropologist and Tibetologist and the director of the Mongolian and Inner Asia Studies Unit (MIASU). Particularly interested in Tibetan books as artefacts, I am currently working on the AHRC funded project: “Transforming Technologies and Buddhist Book Culture: the Introduction of Printing and Digital Text Reproduction in Tibetan Societies” hosted by the University of Cambridge in collaboration with the British Library. I published a monograph on a Tibetan princess who promoted early Tibetan printing (When a Woman Becomes a Religious Dynasty: The Samding Dorje Phagmo of Tibet [Columbia University Press 2007]–see also http://www.innerasiaresearch.org/woman lama/), several articles on the materiality and the social and ritual significance of Tibetan books and, in 2012, I co-edited (with Stephen Hugh-Jones) a special issue of the French journal Terrain on the book as ‘object’ http://terrain.revues.org/

Ryan Dobran (English)

My current research centers around poetic form and textuality in 20th century poetry in English, specifically the work of J.H. Prynne, but also Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, and Edward Dorn. I am a co-editor of the academic open-access journal Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary.

Tom Durno (English)

I’m just about to begin the second year of a PhD on ode-writing from 1786-1820, and am especially interested in ode-writing for ephemera and newspapers at this stage. I’m currently working on a bibliography of odes in the British Library’s Burney and British Newspaper collections, and a paper on the interaction of odes’ line-indentation and metre in the period. I have a more general research interest in visual and vocal renderings of poetic rhythm and metre that seems to fall within the Centre’s remit.

Tim Eggington (Librarian, Queen’s College Cambridge)

My principal bibliographic interests concern the collecting and editing of renaissance music (print and manuscript) in 18th-century Europe and the impact this had on English musical style and culture of the period. Following from this I am currently nearing completion of a book on the influential 18th-century London-based organization known as the Academy of Ancient Music.

Currently College Librarian at Queens’, I am fascinated by the inter-relationships between intellectual history and book history, as well as in all aspects of the curation and promotion of early print and manuscript collections.

Iain Fenlon (Music)

Following the award of a Leverhulme grant in 200-2003, I have continued to work on printed sources of music before 1650 in Iberian libraries. This topic is essentially about the importation of printed books from Italy and Flanders during that period. I am currently preparing a catalogue of the material.

Vittoria Feola (History and Philosopy of Science)

I took my PhD in Cambridge with a thesis about Elias Ashmole and the Uses of Antiquity. I have been a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris and the Francqui Postdoctoral Fellow at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. I am currently a researcher at the Josephinum Museum, Medical University of Vienna, where I am exploring for the first time a wealth of Viennese manuscripts and books about drug-making broadly conceived. I am the editor of Antiquarianism and Science in Urban Networks, ca 1580-1700, forthcoming with Brepols. I am also currently cataloguing Elias Ashmole’s library (see my article in Bibliotheca 1 [2005]). I am also part of the History of Oxford University Press project, contributing two essays, one on science and another on law books, c. 1585-1780, published by OUP.

Philip Ford (French)

At present, I teach in and coordinate the European Literature and Culture MPhil History of the Book module. My own work focuses on Renaissance French and Latin texts, and I was recently involved in the Montaigne exhibition in the University Library.

Kathryn Forsyth (English)

I studied for my BA (Literature and History) and my MA (Medieval and Early Modern Textual Cultures) in the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. I am now undertaking my PhD, provisionally entitled ‘Commerce and Confession in the Marian Book Trade’ in the English Faculty, University of Cambridge.

My research is broadly interested in the book trade under Mary Tudor, particularly in investigating what drove Marian stationers to participate in textual production between 1553 and 1558. I am keen to re-assess the relationship between literary, religious and commercial interests in the culture of Marian England.

My wider interests in the history of the book and the early modern book trade include bibliographical research into John Milton: my MA dissertation was entitled ‘Milton’s Printers and Publishers: Politics, Polemic, and Profit 1641-1667’.

James Freeman (English)

My research focuses on the readership, reception, and historiographical significance of Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon.

John Gallagher (History)

I am in the beginning stages of doctoral research on encounters of language as experienced by English-speakers in the early modern world. My M.Phil research was on the study and experience of Italian in early modern England, and I hope to expand on this in order to better understand the multi-sensory experience of early modern interlinguistic communication. This will, in part, involve a study of the relationship between early modern linguistic pedagogy and instances of language practice and use.

John Gardner (English, Anglia Ruskin)

John Gardner is Principal Lecturer in English Literature at Anglia Ruskin University. He mainly teaches Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture. His recent research has focussed on poetry and politics in the years following the battle of Waterloo, which he explores in his book Poetry and Popular Protest; Peterloo, Cato Street and the Queen Caroline Controversy (Palgrave, 2011). He is currently supervising PhDs on Fanny Burney and conservative poetry of the 1790s. His current research is on the transmission of radicalism through the 1820s.

Georg Gerleigner (Classics)

After studying for a Magister Artium degree in Classical Archaeology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, I am now working on a Ph.D. thesis about painted inscriptions on Ancient Greek pottery at the Faculty of Classics in Cambridge. My study focusses on the relationship between these inscriptions and the images which contain them, painted on Greek (mainly Athenian) pots between the 7th and 4th centuries BC.

Heather Glen (English)

Heather Glen is a Fellow of New Hall, Cambridge, and Reader in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Cambridge.  She is editor of the Penguin Classics edition of Charlotte Brontë’s  The Professor and of The Cambridge Companion to the Brontës.  Her most recent book is Charlotte Brontë: the Imagination in History.

Mark Goldie (History)

My field is British Intellectual, Political, and Religious History 1650-1750. I’ve always been anxious that ‘Cambridge’ intellectual history should more securely contextualise its work in publishing history, the history of the book, and so forth.

Robert Gordon (Italian)

I teach in the Italian department of the Modern and Medieval Languages Faculty. My research interests lie in the literature, cinema and cultural and intellectual history of modern Italy. My current research project is about responses to the Holocaust in postwar Italy.

Mina Gorji (English)

Mina Gorji is a Lecturer in the Faculty of English and a Fellow of Pembroke College. She is interested in the art of the uncultivated and her published works include a monograph, John Clare and the Place of Poetry, an edited collection, Rude Britannia, as well as essays on literary awkwardness, pastoral, working class poetry and weeds (forthcoming).

Fiona Green (English)

Fiona Green is a lecturer in the Faculty of English and a Fellow of Jesus College. She writes on twentieth-century British and American poetry.

James Harmer (English)

I work on philosophies of language and theories of meaning (ancient and more current) in literature predominantly of the sixteenth-century. I have an interest in the textual, bibliographical and adversarial dimensions of early modern editions of classical texts (especially Plato and Ovid), and in manuscript evidence of writers imitating, transforming, even travestying classical models.

Michael Hetherington (English)

I am currently writing a PhD on ideas of miscellaneity in Renaissance literature. My work aims to enhance our understanding of poetic miscellanies and other kinds of miscellaneous text by recovering the conceptual frameworks that readers and writers might have brought to them. Currently I am focusing on the theory and practice of ‘cohærence’ in the writings of Abraham Fraunce.

Ruth Hepworth (English)

I am about to enter the second year of my PhD and am currently looking at how the figure of the avatar can be said to function through the materiality of different media texts. For example, I am looking at literature, film, and digital narratives such as hypertext literature and blogs. I have been influenced a good deal by Katherine Hayles’s work on materiality and literary texts, and her Media Specific Analysis. I am also involved in the Intermedia Research Group at CRASSH.

Deborah Hodder (Newnham College Library)

I am the Librarian at Newnham College, Cambridge.

Sarah Howe (English)

I am interested in the many crossovers between textual and visual spheres in the literary culture of Renaissance England. My doctoral research has looked at the visual imagination in literature, taking a comparative approach that has sometimes involved a more ‘material’ model of intertextuality: how might a poem be like a painted ceiling, a heraldic device, an anamorphic portrait, or a whitewashed chapel?

My new project is a study of sixteenth and seventeenth-century illustrated books, with a particular focus on the narrativity of images, emblems and visual paratexts. The development of the printed author portrait is an ongoing fascination of mine; in the past I have taken a statistical approach to the subject, using the tools of bibliography to put notions like Foucault’s ‘author function’ to the test. During the John Milton 400^th anniversary celebrations, I curated an exhibition, now online <http://www.christs.cam.ac.uk/current-students/library/milton400>, of the wonderful Milton collection at Christ’s College, with a special interest in the history of illustrating Paradise Lost.

Peter Jones (King’s College Library)

My research interests centre on late medieval and early modern books, manuscript and printed, that contain scientific and medical information with a practical orientation. I am interested in patterns of circulation and appropriation of knowledge among practitioners and lay people. Currently I am working on the Generation to Reproduction project in HPS that has a strand concerned with ‘Representation and communication’, investigating how changing understandings of sex, development and evolution were produced, debated and used.

Lauren Kassell (History and Philosophy of Science)

My research focuses on early modern medicine, astrology, alchemy and magic. I know more about Simon Forman, the Elizabethan astrologer-physician, than anyone should. I am currently working on two major projects. The first is a book on magical ideas and practices in early modern England, provisionally titled ‘The Sons of Minerva’ and contracted with Yale University Press. The second is The Casebooks Project, which, in partnership with the Bodleian Library, will produce an electronic edition of Simon Forman and Richard Napier’s medical records, 1596–1634, and will use these records as a centerpiece for studying how the medical subject has been created and represented.

Neil Kenny (French)

I’m currently writing articles on the role of the early modern printed title-page in ‘scientific’ books, on the affinities between early modern French travelogues and collecting, and on a miscellany by a late sixteenth-century printer-writer (Guillaume Bouchet). My longer-term project is on the uses of tenses in writing about the dead in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French and Latin.

John Kerrigan (English)

My interest in textual scholarship began in the 1980s when there was a ferment of new thinking about the ‘instability’ of Shakespeare’s texts, especially, at that point, Quarto and Folio King Lear. This led me to work on editorial theory, and to explore the material conditions of textual production and circulation. My current research spans the early modern and the contemporary periods, attentive at both ends to way layout, format and the economics of print and the internet impact on the experience of reading.

Wai Kirkpatrick (King’s College Library)

Alison Knight (English; CRASSH)

My work focuses on the History of the Bible in English. My PhD (Cambridge) investigates early modern approaches to the textuality of scripture; I emphasise literary interactions with the Book of Job, which presents numerous textual challenges. I am currently a Research Associate at CRASSH, where I am part of a research team that is investigating the Bible and antiquity in the nineteenth century. My work examines cultural emphases on “the English Bible” in this period.

Sachiko Kusukawa (History and Philosophy of Science)

I have just finished a book on 16th century scientific illustrations (Picturing the Book of Nature, with Chicago, 2011), which includes quite a bit on technical and financial aspects of image production in printed book. My next project is on image-making in the early Royal Society (including how illustrations in the Philosophical Transactions were produced). I am also Co-Investigator for an AHRC research project on the function of astronomical images in the early modern period, which also looks as issues such as transmission, production and genre.

A.C. Lashmore Davies (English)

I am currently working on an edition of previously unpublished letters by Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751). More generally, my research explores intellectual, literary, and textual issues in relation to writing in the long eighteenth century.

Elisabeth Leedham-Green (Darwin College, Archivist)

I am ex-Deputy Keeper of the University Archives; currently the Ancient Archivist of Corpus Christi College, and Fellow and Archivist of Darwin. Some years ago I used to do some teaching for the palaeography and bibliography modules of the MPhil in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. My interests are in the circulation of texts, chiefly in, but by no means exclusively from, the British Isles from c. 1500 to 1680.

Hester Lees-Jeffries (English)

I am editing Shirley’s The Example, for the Complete Works of James Shirley (OUP); and vol. 4 of The Works of John Webster for CUP. I have also edited Thomas Watson’s manuscript translation of Bernard Palissy’s treatise ‘Of Waters and Fountains’ (Houghton MS Eng 707), for History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes.

Megan Leitch (English)

My research concerns treason in fifteenth-century English prose romances, primarily from a literary perspective, but sometimes veering into the realm of the history of the book.

Claire Lockwood (English)

Rosalind Love (Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic)

I have just finished a year’s research leave working on a Leverhulme-funded project jointly with people in the English Faculty in Oxford, focused on the early medieval manuscripts of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, specifically with the aim of editing and analysing the glossing and marginal commentary that is in the nearly 80 surviving manuscripts up to 1100 (project website).

Raphael Lyne (English)

Raphael Lyne works on renaissance literature, and his approach in recent years has increasingly been inflected by cognitive theory. One result of this is a book, Shakespeare, Rhetoric, and Cognition (CUP, 2011). He would probably rather not debate until the cows come home about whether this kind of work is very material, or not at all material. Instead he’d mention that he is currently co-editing (with Cathy Shrank) Shakespeare’s poems for Longman, which definitely does have a material side, including a fascination with Q7 of Venus and Adonis.

Scott Mandelbrote (History)

As the Perne Librarian at Peterhouse, I am responsible for the college’s collections of manuscripts (which represent perhaps the most significant survival of a pre-Reformation College library in Cambridge) and rare books (some of which made up perhaps the finest library in Cambridge, c. 1600). I organise an M.Phil. class on ‘The Book’ for the Early Modern M.Phil. in the History Faculty.

My own research concentrates on early modern intellectual history. Among other topics, I have published on the history of scientific and medical libraries; the manuscripts of Isaac Newton; the archaeology of the library at Peterhouse; the survival and transmission of manuscripts of the Bible, and the publication, distribution, and readership of Bibles and other religious books. I have contributed to both the Cambridge History of Libraries in Great Britain and Ireland and the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, and will be writing several chapters for the forthcoming History of Oxford University Press. I am general editor of the publications of the Oxford Bibliographical Society.

Peter Mandler (History)

I am an historian of 19th and 20th-century Britain and more recently have been extending my interests across the Atlantic to the U.S. as well, especially as regards the twentieth century. My principal interests in CMT’s sphere lie: first, in the creation and dissemination in Britain and the U.S. of information about the wider world, as embodied in texts and also in institutions (like research institutes and area-studies centres); second, in the propagation of social-scientific ideas and vocabularies through popular media. I have a particular interest in the rise of the non-fiction bestselling book since the 1920s.

David McKitterick (Wren Library, Trinity College)

David McKitterick is Honorary Professor of Historical Bibliography in the University, a Fellow and the Librarian of Trinity College. His many publications as author, editor or contributor include Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830 and The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. He is a fellow of the British Academy, vice-president of the Bibliographical Society and president of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society.

Farah Mendlesohn (Anglia Ruskin)

Farah Mendlesohn is Head of the Department of English, Communication, Film and Media at Anglia Ruskin University. Her research interests are early magazine science fiction and fantasy.

Drew Milne (English)

I am currently interested in the materiality of modernist and contemporary poetry, and in ways of thinking about the material status of modernist performance texts and their related ephemera.

John Morrill (History)

John Morrill is Professor of British and Irish History in the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Selwyn College. He is a prolific author with over 100 publications mainly on the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries and with special interests in state formation, religious ideas, and the nature of the British Revolutions of the 1640s and 1650s. He was the pioneer editor (originally for OUP) of the Royal Historical Society Bibliography of British and Irish History, and he was one of the principal investigators for the 8,000 survivor depositions from the massacres in Ireland in the winter of 1641-2. He has also chaired the editorial board for the multi-volume Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly, 1643-1653 (OUP, 2011) and is the editor in chief of a new five-volume edition of all the writings and speeches of Oliver Cromwell (OUP, forthcoming).

Subha Mukherji (English)

My interest in material texts began when I started working on law and literature, and examining court records and exhibits from the early modern period. Much of my work has been informed by archival evidence. I have recently been engaged with the material spaces of the text, especially its thresholds, as well as the lay-out of poems and letters. My current research is about literary form and the uses of doubt, a project that may involve an examination on the indeterminacies as well as the determining functions of the material dimension of texts, both manuscript and print; it will also address the relation between texts, objects and personhood.

Michael Mumisa (Middle Eastern Studies)

My research investigates early (8th -10th century CE) ‘Abbasid notions, imaginations, and constructions of the Jahili past (from the later 5th century CE), and seeks to re-assess modern scholarship on classical Arabic literature which has predominantly been characterized by formalist ‘close reading’ strategies which have not seriously considered the historicity of Jahili (ancient) poetry. There has been an assumption, particularly within New Critical and Structuralist readings of Jahili poetry, that it is possible to have unmediated access to the poems. Such reading strategies have approached the Jahili poems as decontextualised, ahistorical, and self-contained aesthetic objects. My study involves a close analysis of ancient Arabic texts in terms of discursive practices that produced, sustained, and promoted the notions of the Jahiliyya in early ‘Abbasid society.

Thomas Neal (Music)

I am an MPhil research student, based in the Faculty of Music. My research concerns music and liturgy in sixteenth-century Rome, with a particular focus on the music of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. My MPhil dissertation will present a comprehensive study of the sources (both manuscript and print) of Palestrina’s hymns for the Office of Vespers, studying the relationship between liturgy and reform expressed textually. Other recent research projects include a study of London BL Royal 8 G.vii (a Flemish choirbook gifted to Henry VIII and Catharine of Aragon, c.1516); a study of the various editions of Giovanni Guidetti’s Directorium Chori (1582, 1589, 1604, 1624, 1642); and the sources of Monteverdi’s Lamento d’Arianna (1608).

Mark Nicholls (St John’s College Library)

My teaching and research interests lie in Tudor and Stuart government and politics. My major publications are Investigating Gunpowder Plot (Manchester, 1991) and The History of the Modern British Isles, 1: The Two Kingdoms, 1529-1603 (Oxford, 1999) the first volume in the Blackwell History of Modern Britain series. I have also published several analyses of conspiracies and state trials, as well as studies of ‘succession politics’ at the death of Queen Elizabeth I, the political career of Sir Walter Raleigh, and University humour. I completed a new edition of George Percy’s ‘Trewe Relacyon’ (2005), one of the key texts chronicling the initial English settlement at Jamestown, in Virginia. Having edited the Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research for eight years, I retains an active interest in the history and traditions of the British Army. I was closely involved in the conferences and public events marking the 400th anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot conspiracy in 2005.

Mark Nicholls and Penry Williams’s Sir Walter Raleigh: in life and legend was published by Continuum early in 2011.

Máire Ní Mhaonaigh (Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic)

I am interested in Text and Context and in the learned, cultural environment in which early medieval texts, primarily of Ireland, but also of Wales and Iceland, were produced. Editorial work forms part of my research and I have a particular interest in eleventh- and twelfth-century pseudo-historical narratives which shed light on Hiberno-Scandinavian relations.

Desha A. Osborne (English)

My research is on the epic poem Hiroona: an historical romance in poetic form, written sometime in the 1880s by the Reverend Canon Horatio Nelson Huggins. The poem was not published until 1930, thirty-five years after Huggins’s death, by his daughters and nephew who funded its limited printing.

Kendra Packham (English)

My current research explores matters of rhetoric and genre, political and religious context, and book history in relation to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writing.

Stella Panayatova (Fitzwilliam Museum)

Stella Panayatova is Keeper of Manuscripts and Printed Books at the Fitzwilliam Museum. She is part of the team for the Hamilton Kerr Institute/Department of Chemistry/Fitzwilliam Museum project on the pigment analysis of illuminated manuscripts.

Ian Patterson (English)

As part of the work I do on literature and politics in twentieth-century Britain and America, I have a longstanding interest in the publication history of poetry and fiction in the early and mid- twentieth century, particularly the more fugitive or short-lived or eccentric periodicals and ephemera. This is shaped by two impulses, one essentially bibliographical, the other aesthetic and epistemological, which come together in a focus on the material forms of publication and exchange. Small press publication, little magazines, politically-inspired periodicals with a cultural bent, pamphlets, and quotidian cultural and political commentary are my main interest in this field, along with the networks of circulation that sustain them; this is supplemented by a concern with typography, book design, private presses (especially in the period between 1918 and 1933) and patterns of patronage, translation and literary agency. Although some of this takes the form of literary or cultural history, I am also interested in the ways in which the experience of the material form in which the text is read affects and shapes the reader’s response to it. (I am also Keeper of the Queens’ College Old Library.)

Natalia I. Petrovskaia (Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic)

I am writing a PhD thesis on the “Medieval Welsh Perceptions of the Orient” in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic under the supervision of Dr Paul Russell. For the academic year 2010-11 I am also a visiting Research Student at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris on the invitation of Prof. Patrick Gautier Dalché. Recent publications include “Dating Peredur: New Light on Old Problems”, Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 2009 (2010), pp. 223-243 and, forthcoming, “La disparition du quasi dans les formules étymologiques des traductions galloises de l’Imago Mundi”, in Elise Louviot & Colette Stévanovitch, éds., La Formule au Moyen-Âge, ARTeM (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012). I am particularly interested in texts and concepts that cross cultural and linguistic borders.

Harriet Phillips (English)

My doctoral thesis is about ideological and rhetorical constructions of the popular in early modern England. I am particularly interested in how contemporary ideas about popular culture developed in an era of cheap print, and in the possibilities this presented for writers, publishers, and readers. My main focus is on ballads and broadsides from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, in relation to which I am considering notions of ephemerality, commodification, collection, material form, and material process.

Adrian Poole (English)

I am one of four general editors for a complete new edition of the novels and tales of Henry James, to be published by Cambridge University Press; I am myself editing The Princess Casamassima (the autograph ms. for which has, unusually for James, survived). As one would expect, the work of the edition involves extensive engagement with publishing practices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, on both sides of the Atlantic. I am also a member of the editorial board for a complete new edition of the writings of Evelyn Waugh, to be published by Oxford University Press.

Ed Potten (University Library)

Now head of Rare Books at the Cambridge University Library, I was formerly responsible for the early-printed collections at The John Rylands Library, The University of Manchester, where I lectured on the history of the book, the arrival of the printing press and icunable editions of Dante. I have recently published on the use of liturgical books in the fifteenth century and seventeenth-century book production and collecting.

Claire Preston (English)

My main research interests and publications are in seventeenth-century literature, particularly the rhetoric of scientific writing. I’m currently working on a book which includes chapters on scientific correspondence networks, and on the textual representations of the drainage wars in East Anglia. I’ve also published work on emblems, imprese, and the early-modern illustrated book. I’m the general editor of the new Oxford edition of Sir Thomas Browne (8 vols), now in progress.

Robert Priest (History)

My interests centre on the circulation and popularisation of ‘high’ ideas in the context of the development of mass publishing in late nineteenth-century Europe. My most recent research concerns the French historian Ernest Renan’s best-selling ‘Life of Jesus’ (1863). I have attempted to trace this book’s reception among its unprecedentedly broad audience, paying particular attention to archives of reader correspondence. My current work mainly considers the international circulation of texts and ideas about the historical Jesus in the long nineteenth century. Using a range of archival material, I am also attempting to reconsider ‘from below’ various cultural moments in turn-of-the-century France.

Renee Raphael (History and Philosophy of Science)

I am a research associate with the AHRC-funded project “Diagrams, Figures, and the Transformation of Astronomy, 1450-1650″ with the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. My own research focuses on the reception of Galileo’s 1632 ‘Dialogo’ and 1638 ‘Discorsi’ from their publication to the end of the seventeenth-century by Jesuits at the Collegio Romano.

Samantha Rayner (English/Publishing, Anglia Ruskin University)

I am the Assistant Director of the Cultures of the Digital Economy research institute and Senior Lecturer in Publishing at Anglia Ruskin University. I teach and write on publishing and book-related topics, with special interests in the eBook and eBook reader, the culture of bookselling, editors and editing, literary festivals and literary ephemera. I also teach on English Literature courses and have specialisms in Medieval and Arthurian texts.

My monograph, Images of Kingship in Chaucer and his Ricardian Contemporaries, was published by Boydell in 2008 and I am the co-editor for the forthcoming new Intellect journal, Book 2.0.

Lucy Razzall (English)

I am a Research Fellow at Emmanuel College. My doctoral dissertation examined the rich material and metaphorical affordances of objects which can be categorised as ‘containers’ in early modern English literature, including the codex itself as a material and intellectual form. I am currently developing this project for publication, as well as starting new research on ideas of recycling and reuse in early modern English literature and material culture. In 2012 I co-convened the ‘Texts and Textiles’ conference hosted by the CMT.

Annie Ring (German and Dutch)

My PhD thesis is concerned with representations of the East German secret police (the ‘Stasi’) in German fiction and film since 1989. I am interested in the place of post-unification literature and film in recent debates about socialism in Germany; in their portrayal of conditions of subjectivity and authorship before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall; and in the interaction between these literary and filmic works and the historical archives of the former state security service.

John Rink (Music)

I have been studying the manuscript and printed sources of Chopin’s music for about twenty years. I initially became involved in a conventional print edition – The Complete Chopin – which employs a ‘best-text’ approach although significant variants are reproduced so that performers can decide which to play in any given performance. I then directed a four-year Leverhulme project (1998-2001) studying the multiple versions of the first editions; this gave rise to a 993-page book – Annotated Catalogue of Chopin’s First Editions – which Christophe Grabowski and I published with CUP in 2010. In the meantime, I began work on two digital projects: an AHRC-funded Resource Enhancement project entitled Chopin’s First Editions Online (CFEO), and the Online Chopin Variorum Edition (OCVE), which is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. These projects explore the creative history of Chopin’s music in different ways, both during his lifetime and to the present day. They also challenge prevailing notions of the musical work while potentially offering new opportunities to performers.

Charlotte Roberts (English)

I am currently completing a thesis on the eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. My interests include historiography, irony, and the eighteenth-century reception of ancient Rome, especially its ruins and fragments.

Dunstan C. D. Roberts (English)

My research deals with readers’ annotations in early modern religious books, and is intended to provide a more detailed account of the ways in which the Reformation altered people’s perceptions of books and their habits of reading. The work is based on a large sample of primary materials and seeks to combine broad statistical observations with a close examination of individual texts. In addition to providing evidence for a broad developmental thesis–that annotations tended to become more expressive, and sometimes more combative following the Reformation–it also explores a number of more historically specific phenomena, such the state-driven programme of prayer book censorship which occurred between 1535 and 1553.

See our ‘Projects’ page for details of the National Trust libraries project, for which Dunstan Roberts is an RA.

Paul Russell (Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic)

I have just completed an AHRC-funded project on Early Irish Glossaries and we are in the process of preparing the editions for publication. I work in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic and my interests are mainly linguistic and philological with a strong line in learned texts, such as glossaries and grammars, and Latin manuscripts glossed in various Celtic languages.

Austen Saunders (English)

I work on early modern book history, particularly readers’ annotating practices which are the subject of my PhD thesis. I am interested in the way books were integrated by their users into the practise of economic, religious, and political life. I look at individual readers including John Field (a leading Elizabethan puritan) and Henry Arthington (a rather wild presbyterian revolutionary), but also more generally at how social life shaped the way people used books – and how the way people used books shaped society.

Jason Scott-Warren (English)

My research ranges widely in early modern literary and cultural history; history of reading/history of the book; textual/manuscript studies; writing and the self; and the literatures of London.

My recent work has built on the anthropological elements of my first book, Sir John Harington and the Book as Gift (2001). I have been studying marks of appropriation in individual books, and on the evidence of reading in account-books and letters, to reconstruct the relationship between texts and the textures of everyday life. I am currently writing a monograph about Shakespeare’s first documented reader, Richard Stonley.

Richard Serjeantson (History)

My current research, much of which is undertaken in collaboration with Dr Angus Vine, focuses on the writings of Francis Bacon, especially those from between 1603 and 1613. As such I am interested in questions of bibliography, codicology, palaeography, and textual transmission, especially as they pertain to the many surviving manuscripts (and rather fewer printed books) of his works from this period. A recent publication arising from this research is: R. W. Serjeantson and Thomas Woolford, ‘The Scribal Publication of a Printed Book: Francis Bacon’s Certaine considerations touching the Church of England (1604)’, The Library, 7th ser., 10 (2009), 119–56.

Nicholas Smith (University Library / Cambridge Bibliographical Society)

Nick Sparks (Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic)

My research interests chiefly lie in the study of manuscripts, textual scholarship, textual criticism, and the transmission of texts in the middle ages; also, of course, palaeography, historical bibliography, and the provenance and survival of manuscripts.

Mark Strange (East Asian Studies)

My research focuses on Chinese historiography between the 4th and 11th centuries. It explores the textual relationships between different historical narratives, and the ideological agendas that inform those relationships. That raises issues of manuscript production and textual commentary. I am also undertaking a critical edition of a third-century Chinese joke book, Xiao lin.

Elsa Strietman (Dutch)

My research is in the early modern literature and history of the Low Countries, with a special interest in the prolific drama culture of the late-fifteenth and the sixteenth-century and the social and religious aspects of the texts and the activities of the amateur drama and poetry guilds, the Chambers of Rhetoric.

Andrew Taylor (English)

One part of my current work on English humanists explores the competition for authority between manuscripts and printed editions of ancient texts, including the rhetoric of editors and translators (often combined). It also involves the emergence of scholarly printing in England. I contribute to the MML History of the Book, 1450-1650 MPhil module.

Leah Tether (English/Publishing, Anglia Ruskin University)

I have a BA, MA and PhD from Durham University in Modern Languages, with a specific interest in Medieval French Literature. I now work as a Research Fellow at Anglia Ruskin’s Cultures of the Digital Economy institute, and lecture on the University’s MA in Publishing pathway. I also lecture intermittently on Durham University’s MA in Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

My current research centres on the relationship between medieval and digital reading cultures, with particular foci on hypertext, abbreviation and the history of the book publishing trade. I am also the author of the forthcoming The Continuations of Chrétien’s Perceval: Content and Construction, to be published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd.

Corin Throsby (English)

My research focuses on the relationship between readers and authors in the nineteenth century. I am currently looking at the correspondence between prominent literary figures and their most enthusiastic admirers; I am interested in what “fan mail” can tell us about the way certain authors were read in their time, and also about an emerging culture of celebrity in the Romantic period. I also look at other fan activities in the nineteenth century: commonplace books and scrapbooking; fan clubs; and amateur stories or “fan fiction” based on existing work.

Anne Toner (English)

I am interested in the history of punctuation. In particular, I have written about the evolution of marks of suspension and omission in English literary texts and have recently edited a special issue of Visible Language (2011) which brings together essays that examine punctuation from different disciplinary viewpoints and as used within different media. I have also co-edited, with Joe Bray and Miriam Handley, a collection of essays on visual and material elements of literary works: Ma(r)king the Text: The Presentation of Meaning on the Literary Page (Ashgate, 2000).

Tessa Webber (History)

My own current research is on the books and texts used for ‘public’ reading within religious communities from c.1000-c.1250: i.e. the reading in the refectory, at collation, during the daily meeting in chapter, and the readings of the night office.

Neil Weijer (History)

I am a Medieval History MPhil, currently researching reception of the Middle English Prose Brut chronicle in the late medieval period. The project involves research into the reading, composition, and annotation of the wealth of surviving manuscripts and printed books of the Brut, as well as of contemporary vernacular histories. I hope to establish a firm grasp of what a medieval reader (or a group of medieval readers) was able to extract from the Brut by looking at it in this particular prose form, and in turn to investigate how that prose form affected the Brut’s editors when the time came to continue the chronicle. I am also interested in the way information about manuscripts and incunabula are currently shared among the scholarly community, and in making the particular quirks of all these books (and not just the ones with shiny pictures) more accessible to remote researchers.

Becca Weir (English)

Becca Weir is a Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge. She is working on a book about the relationship between war reportage and poetry in the era of the American Civil War.

HOT OFF THE (DIGITAL) PRESS: Becca has co-edited a digital anthology of Poems of the Anglo-African and National Anti-Slavery Standard, 1863–1864; click here to access.

Jill Whitelock (University Library)

Edward Wilson-Lee (English)

I work on literature in the first two centuries of print. I have published articles on the print and readership history of chivalric romances and broadside ballads, and have book projects in the final stages on the circulation of Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’ and on the role of translators in the early modern book trade.

Laura Wright (English)

Laura Wright is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of English and a Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College. Her books include Sources of London English (1996) and (as editor) The Development of Standard English 1300-1800 (2000).

Andrew Zurcher

I work on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, with a particular focus on the works of Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, and William Shakespeare. With Raphael Lyne and Gavin Alexander, I wrote English Handwriting 1500-1700: An Online Course, now part of an AHRC-funded project, based at the Cambridge Faculty of English, called Scriptorium: Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts Online. I am one of the general editors of the Collected Works of Edmund Spenser for Oxford University Press, and with Christopher Burlinson co-edited Edmund Spenser, Selected Letters and Other Papers (OUP, 2009). I maintain both the Edmund Spenser Home Page and the Sidney-Spenser Discussion List.

My research to date has emphasised early modern legal history, Elizabethan colonial and military activity in Ireland, textual studies (including palaeography and manuscript studies), the sixteenth-century reception of Academic and Pyrrhonist epistemology, early modern secretarial practice, and the theory and practice of allegory in the sixteenth century.