Dr Ruth Abbott, St John's

rha23@cam.ac.uk

 

 

Biographical Information

I'm a University Associate Professor in the English Faculty, and a Fellow and Director of Studies at St John's College. I've held fellowships at Cornell University, the University of Oxford, the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (Cambridge), the Harvard University Institute for Renaissance Studies (Villa I Tatti, Florence), the Huntington Library (California), and the Beinecke Library (Yale University). 

At undergraduate level, I teach practical criticism and critical practice and the literature and history of the 18th and 19th centuries. At graduate level, I supervise MPhil and PhD students working in textual scholarship and on 18th and 19th century topics, and teach for MPhil strands in Material Texts and 18th and 19th century topics. I've received CUSU student-led teaching awards for both supervising and lecturing and a University Pilkington Prize for excellence in teaching.

I've served as the Faculty's Outreach Officer and on the University's Outreach Steering Group, and on College and Faculty committees on Equality, Diversity, and Inclusivity. As a member of the University's Harassment Avoidance Working Group, I helped to develop 'Breaking the Silence', a campaign to improve the prevention, response, support, and investigation of harassment and sexual misconduct across the collegiate university.

Research Interests

My research and teaching focus on textual scholarship and 18th- and 19th-century manuscripts, chiefly notebooks and the history of note-taking, with an emphasis on compositional practices, reading practices, the history of scholarship, the organisation of knowledge, and the history of institutions such as libraries, universities, and museums.

The Wordsworths' Notebooks

I've been working on the Wordsworth family's poetic notebooks since 2006. I'm interested in what we learn when we study these notebooks as whole documents, how the Wordsworths used their notebooks as creative and critical tools, and what they reveal about shared composition and the interaction of speech and writing. As well as articles on this material in Textual Practice, The Wordsworth Circle, and Notes and Queries, I have a digital edition of eleven notebooks, three letters, and one printed book coming out this year in the Cambridge University Digital Library: https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/wordsworth. I collaborate often and closely with the Wordsworth Trust; in 2026, they're publishing my boxed facsimile edition A Wordsworth Family Notebook: Dove Cottage Manuscript 16 in Facsimile with Transcription and Commentary. With Michael Rossington, I'm also editing William Wordsworth for the Longman Annotated English Poets series.  

Sound and writing

My work on the interaction of speech and writing in the Wordsworths' notebooks developed out of a broader interest in this topic, and especially in prosody and verse form. My articles on William Wordsworth in Memory Studies (2010), Textual Practice (2014), The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth (2015), and Notes & Queries (2016) explore these topics, as do those on George Eliot in ELH (2015), on D. W. Griffith in Writing, Medium, Machine: Modern Technographies (2016), and on Denise Riley in Forms of Late Modernist Lyric (2021).

Thomas Gray's Scholarly Manuscripts

I started editing digitally when I founded the Cambridge University Digital Library collection Thomas Gray Manuscripts (https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/thomasgray, 2021--2025). I'm interested in Gray's extensive multidisciplinary scholarship, which he pursued and disseminated in manuscript, and in his experiments with scholarly methods and the organisation of information. I've published fine facsimile editions of Gray's scholarly manuscripts, specifically his three-volume commonplace book (Pembroke College, 2024) and recently rediscovered copies of The Naturalist's Journal (Roxburghe Club, 2024), alongside open access digital editions of the same manuscripts plus two of Gray's pocket books and five shorter sets of notes. For Thomas Gray among the Disciplines (2025), a multiauthor book on Gray's polymathy that I edited with Ephraim Levinson, I wrote a preface on the organisation of knowledge in Gray's manuscripts and a chapter on Gray's methods of manuscript transcription in the British Museum. My chapter in The Cambridge Companion to the Poem (2024) uses Gray's manuscripts as its case study to present the method of documentary reading that underpins almost all my research.

Printed blank forms

I became interested in the history of printed blank forms through working on Gray's pocket books and Naturalist's Journal, or rather in the history of how printed blank forms have been filled and not filled, and disobeyed and doodled over. I developed this interest in a collaboration with the artist Chloe Steele, which so far has resulted in an exhibition and an article in Critical Quarterly (2025), 'Blank Forms for Future Applications', which interleaves my writing with her artwork.

Interleaved books

Another interest I developed through working on Gray was in the history of interleaving printed books with blank pages for note-making, or rather, again, in the history of how such interleaves have actually been used. I've been pursuing this as a collaborative project with Lucy Sixsmith and we are convening a symposium on the topic in 2026.

George Eliot's Reading Notebooks

Since 2014, I've been working on a three-volume edition of and a monograph about the notebooks in which George Eliot documented her reading. I'm interested in the organisation and methods of these notebooks, in their multilingualism and multidisciplinarity, in how rarely she used them to pursue research relevant to her novels (contrary to their popular characterisation as 'quarries'), and in how they served her as a novelist nonetheless. I've published parts of the monograph in ELH (2015) and The British Novel of Ideas: George Eliot to Zadie Smith (2024), as well as survey pieces in The Oxford Handbook of George Eliot (2024) and The Routledge Companion to George Eliot (forthcoming 2026). I have internal grants to finish this project next year.

The history of manuscript transcription

Recently, I've been developing a new monograph project on the post-Renaissance history of manuscript transcription, which investigates how changing ideas about transcription and expertise altered and converged the relationship between scribes and scholars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Parts of this are available in my chapter on Gray's transcribing in Thomas Gray among the Disciplines and an article in Library & Information History (2024), which won the Gordon Duff Prize for an essay on a subject relating to the science or arts of books and manuscripts.

Areas of Graduate Supervision

I've supervised graduate research on topics including anecdotes, annotation, antiquarianism, aphorism, book history, empire, entomology, form, historiography, the history of reading, the history of universities, iconography, literary composition, literature and visual art, manuscript studies, literature and medicine, philosophies of language, poetics, textual scholarship, Victorian periodicals, and the Victorian bible, and on authors including Thomas Gray, Anna Barbauld, the Brontës, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Clare, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Butler, and Virginia Woolf. I'm happy to supervise graduate students on any project relating to textual scholarship, including scholarly and digital editing, and/or 18th- or 19th-century topics. 

Selected Publications