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. From next year, I will be Lecturer and Fellow in English at Trinity College. 

Research Interests

I work primarily on poetry in English and Latin across the period 1550-1750, with interests in translation, poetics, genre, and imitation. The relationship between English and Latin poetics, and the way in which this defines and shapes conceptions of literary value, national and political imaginaries, and individual lives in early modernity and beyond, is at the heart of my research. Another, related thread running through my publications is ‘bad’ and artificial poetry, and the claim to the literary of the ‘bad’ and artificial. 

My forthcoming first monograph provides the first literary history of the apparently counterintuitive practice of translating English poetry into Latin in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Recovering a previously marginalized archive ranging from Antigua to Poland, I use ‘Latinization’ to chart the real and imagined place of English poetry and authors in the world in this period of profound transformation for the English language, canon-formation, and national and political identities. The ideal—increasingly, the fantasy—of Latin translation was one of universality and durability for English literature on a grand scale; yet the interest of these unusual, densely and self-consciously literary texts lies in the details, where the two languages and their values, temporalities and worldviews rub against each other. The translators—an unlikely cast of rogues, outcasts and upstarts—are the protagonists of a counternarrative of literary history in which Latin, not English, would last; there is a pathos to the book’s account of this narrative’s decline, as the life-stories I recount begin to reflect their misplaced confidence. 

I have published on Spenser, Milton, and Shakespeare; I am also interested in George Gascoigne, Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Christopher Smart, William Cowper, and Alice Oswald (among others), and in Tragedy, Epic and 'bad' poetry across time. At Cambridge I have taught the undergraduate papers 'Tragedy', 'English Literature and its Contexts 1500-1700', and 'Practical Criticism and Critical Practice', as well as on the MPhil course, and I lecture on Milton and Tragedy. As a JRF I have published essays on Latin and early romanticism, and King James VI/I's arguably 'bad' poem Lepanto. I coordinated celebrations for the 350th anniversary of John Milton's death at Christ's College, culminating in the redesign and relaunch of the Darkness Visible Milton study site. My current projects include a micrograph on Epic Tragedies; essays on Milton's Latinism and mock-epic, and a book project on the influence of the ‘myth of Latinity’ upon English poetry from Spenser to Wordsworth and the critical tradition beyond. 

Selected Publications

  • 'Languages that Want the Living Voice: Latin and Early Romanticism', The Review of English Studies 77.329 (2026), 195-218: https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgaf092.
  • Introduction to King James's Lepanto, in 'Early Modern Epic and the Global', a special issue of English Literary Renaissance, ed. Jane Grogan and Anthony Welch, forthcoming.
  • '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, 2025).
  • '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, 2025).
  • ‘Latinizing Milton in the English West Indies’, in Milton Across Borders and Media, ed. Islam Issa and Angelica Duran (Oxford University Press, 2023), 
    https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192844743.003.0005, winner of the Milton Society of America's Albert C. Labriola Award 2023.
  • ‘“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.