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, and Christopher Smart, among others. At Christ’s, I am beginning a new project, tentatively titled ‘The Second Text’, which explores what I am calling a poetics of secondariness – the tendency in early modernity for texts to position themselves as other, secondary, or supplementary to a primary sense – across the same broad period as my past research.
Selected Publications
- ‘Latinizing Milton in the English West Indies’, in Milton Across Borders and Media, ed. Islam Issa and Angelica Duran (Oxford University Press), forthcoming December 2023.
- Review of David Hopkins and Tom Mason, Chaucer in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2022), Translation and Literature 32.1 (2023), 112-19: https://doi.org/10.3366/tal.2023.0540.
- ‘“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.
- ‘Neo-Latinity and the Neoteric in Early Modern England’, an ‘Enquête lexicographique’ for the ‘Renaissances’ project hosted by Université Paris Nanterre and Université Paris 8: https://www.renaissances-upl.com/neo-latinity-and-the-neoteric-in-early-modern-england/.
