Dr Katie Mennis, Christ's
kamm5@cam.ac.uk
Biographical Information
I am a Junior Research Fellow in English at Christ's College. I was previously a doctoral student and lecturer at Oxford.
Research Interests
I work primarily on poetry in English and Latin across the period 1550-1750, with interests in translation, poetics, and the relationship between English and Latin literature. My doctoral thesis was on English literature in Latin translation. It provides a literary history of the underexamined phenomenon of ‘Latinizing’ major English authors from Chaucer to Pope in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, placing emphases on the close textual encounters and tensions between Latin and English in these translations; the translators’ extraordinary lives; the temporality of Latinity and translation, and what Latinization can reveal about the changing confidence and anxieties of the ‘rising’ vernacular literary culture on the world stage.
I have published on Spenser, Milton, and Shakespeare’s ‘bad’ love poems, and I am also interested in George Gascoigne, Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Christopher Smart, William Cowper and Alice Oswald. As a JRF I have been working on a number of topics, including Latin and early romanticism, and King James VI/I's arguably 'bad' poem Lepanto, and I have been coordinating celebrations for the 350th anniversary of John Milton's death at Christ's College. I am in the early stages of researching two book-length projects: one on 'artificial' or 'mechanical' versification from Spenser to Wordsworth, and a creative biography project on the poet, translator and convicted coin filer Usher Gahagan.
Selected Publications
- 'From Drab to Worse: Spenser and the Badness of Neo-Latin Verse', in Bad Poetry: New Perspectives on the Value of Sixteenth-Century Literature, ed. Andrew Hadfield and Richard Danson Brown (Boydell and Brewer, forthcoming).
- 'In the Shadow of Lepanto: Translation and Avoidant Allegory at the Court of James VI and I', in The Wrong Direction: Early Modern Translations into Latin, ed. Julia Heideklang and Anja Wolkenhauer (J.B. Metzler, forthcoming).
- ‘Latinizing Milton in the English West Indies’, in Milton Across Borders and Media, ed. Islam Issa and Angelica Duran (Oxford University Press, 2023), http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192844743.003.0005.
- ‘“Bad” Love Lyrics and Poetic Hypocrisy from Gascoigne to Benson’s Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Survey 75 (2022), 265-80: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/shakespeare-survey-75/bad-love-lyrics-and-poetic-hypocrisy-from-gascoigne-to-bensons-shakespeare/EB90E6E06974F367D7DA83C8A9498944.
- ‘Glossing The Shepheardes Calender in Latin Translation’, Translation and Literature 31.1 (2022), 1-34: https://doi.org/10.3366/tal.2022.0492.
