Francesca Gardner, St Catharine's

Degree: PhD
Course: English
Supervisor: Dr Corinna Russell
Dissertation Title: Pastoral Competition After 1700

Biographical Information

I grew up in Lincolnshire and studied for a BA in English Language & Literature at Magdalen College, Oxford, followed by a MSt in English (1700-1830) supplemented by modules in early modern literature, funded by the Senior Mackinnon Scholarship. I am now a PhD student and Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholar at St Catharine's College.

I enjoy writing short stories, birdwatching, film (especially short films and stop motion animation), balloon art, and making puppets.

As I am frequently involved with Access and Outreach and Widening Participation projects, I enthusiastically welcome students at any educational level to drop me an email at fgg23@cam.ac.uk if they would like to discuss applications, interviews, my research interests, or literature in general.

Research Interests

My PhD focuses on the classical pastoral trope of the singing contest. Pastoral poetry is conventionally idealised poetry about shepherds and the countryside; in singing contests, shepherds wager something that they own and face each other in a test of poetic skills until a judge decides the winner. There is very little criticism on this subgenre outside of classical scholarship, particularly after the early modern period and especially compared to the volume of work on amorous and elegiac pastoral. Regarding eighteenth-century studies, the popularity of satirical pastoral (here, the manipulation of the singing contest is front and centre) has been neglected, in contrast to the much more famous genre of mock epic, and the singing contest's epic analogy in the 'battle' (e.g. Swift's Battle of the Books). The singing contest is a container into which the period's disputes are poured; an era of coffee house culture, conversation, and debate, it is used to represent and re-present literary disputes (from Pope and Philips to Johnson's biographers), legal disputes, critical disputes, class-based disputes, and genre-based disputes. The thesis contributes to eighteenth-century studies, to genre studies, and to classical reception studies. It ultimately calls for a re-evaluation of the Romantic pastoral which succeeds eighteenth-century pastoral; often considered solitary, gentle, and conflict-less, it is more influenced by eighteenth-century competitive pastoral than has previously been acknowledged - meaning the origins and development of post-Romantic 'nature poetry' look quite different to how we thought them.

My research interests lie mostly in the early modern period and the long eighteenth century (including Romanticism), and topic-wise include:

Pastoral, georgic, and 'nature' writing | The literary essay | Technography and machines, particularly in relation to Philip Larkin and lawnmower poems | Milton's typology | The conceptualisation and organisisation of knowledge (esp. rhetoric, commonplacing, taxonomy) | Comedy and humour, especially Romantic parody/parodies of the Romantics | Puppets | Light

In general, I am drawn to genre, close reading, and interdisciplinarity.

Projects

From 2021-2022, I worked on Wordsworth Grasmere's Dorothy Wordsworth Transcription Project, involving the transcription of passages from her commonplace book, and took part in the Davy Notebooks Project. From October 2022—March 2023 I worked with Dr Nicole Sheriko, Rebekah King, Abraham Alsalihi, Gregory Miller, and Ilya Wray on a historical reconstruction of the talking magical bronze head from Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay for a talk on the history of puppet theatre at the 2023 Cambridge Festival; I also ran the project's Twitter page and blog. I was co-convenor, with Daniel Brooks, of 'The Pleasures of Hating, 1660-1830', an international conference on literary hatred in the long eighteenth century held in November 2023 at Trinity College, Cambridge, funded by the British Association for Romantic Studies and the Jane Austen Society, also running the project's Twitter page. From July 2023—March 2024 I worked with creative professional Sarah Gomes Harris under Cambridge Creative Encounters to turn 'Making light of essays | Making essays of light' (see Selected Publications) into a video essay and public engagement project. In Michaelmas 2023 I ran three postgraduate reading groups: the Form, Genre, Mode Reading Group (with Cecily Fasham), the New Arcadia Reading Group (with Daniel Brooks), and the Latin Rhetoric Reading Group (with Daniel Brooks and Samuel Webb). From December 2023—May 2024 I was Poetry Editor of The Mays 32, and as of March 2024 I have taken up a position on the BBC Partnership PhD Shadowing Scheme for the National Short Story Award, which gives access and insight into the pleasures and practicalities of arts partnerships, opening up new ways of thinking about how to communicate research. As of January 2025 I have taken up the role of Editor at the Cambridge Review of Books.

In May 2025 my article 'Lawnmower Poetry and the Poetry of Lawnmowers', published in Critical Quarterly, received media attention from The Times, The i Paper, the BBC, BBC Cambridgeshire (radio), ITV News, ITV Anglia, and ARD TV (Tagesschau) and radio.

Selected Publications

  • 'The Pleasures of Hating, 1660-1830' (ed. with Daniel Brooks), special issue, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (forthcoming)
  • 'On the Hunt: Predatory Metaphor and the Early Modern Essay', Cambridge Quarterly 53.3 (September 2025)
  • 'Lawnmower Poetry and the Poetry of Lawnmowers', Critical Quarterly (May 2025)
  • The accretive composition of MS. Don. e. 132', Oxford Research in English 16 (Summer 2023)
  • Review of 'Georgian Illuminations', Sir John Soane's Museum, BSECS Criticks (February 2023)
  • Conference report, 'The Pleasures of Hating, 1660-1830', BARS Blog (December 2023)
  • 'Making light of essays | Making essays of light', Errant 3 (in preparation), joint winner of the Chancellor's English Essay Prize (September 2022)

Media Appearances

  • 'A Certain Place', short story shortlisted for TSS Publishing's Cambridge Prizes (August 2025)
  • 'Intelligent Pig', short story in The Mays 33 (May 2025)
  • 'On Shoelaces', essay in Oxford Review of Books (May 2025)
  • 'Wassail, wassail, all over the town: Cambridge celebrates a winter tradition', article for Varsity (February 2024)
  • Ganymede and Aliena, two rod puppets for a Corpus Playroom production of As You Like It (November 2024)
  • Ariadne, embroidered cyanotype on paper, Cosmoscope Exhibition, Torriano Meeting House (March 2024)
  • 'Making light of essays | Making essays of light', short film for Cambridge Creative Encounters (premiere at the launch of the Cambridge Festival, West Hub, 13th March 2024, exhibited to the public 14th—27th March 2024)
  • Creation of three seagull puppets for an ADC production of Chekhov's The Seagull (May 2023)
  • '"That Vase": The secret lives of objects and machines in Larkin's poetry', Tiny In All That Air, the podcast of the Philip Larkin Society (guest appearance). Released 17th March 2023 [link]
  • Mr Control and Mr Submit (diptych of clown puppets), St Catharine's College Art Fair (February—March 2023)

Selected Presentations

  • 'Gather and Mow: The Poetry of Lawnmowers', public lecture at The Newt in Somerset's Story of Gardening Museum (17th July 2025)
  • 'Incredible Plants and their Secret Worlds', panel discussion with Danny Clarke and Sarah Shuttleworth, British Library and Plantlife collaboration for the Living Knowledge Network, Bristol Central Library and livestreamed across the UK (30th June 2025)
  • 'The late eighteenth-century singing contest and the locus amoneus', BARS 2024: 'Romantic Making and Unmaking', online conference (1st August 2024)
  • 'Pope's Pastoral Judgments' — Eighteenth Century and Romantic Studies Seminar, University of Cambridge (1st February 2024)
  • 'Pastoral play? Alexander Pope's Singing Contests', BSECS 53rd Annual Conference: 'Work and Play', St Hugh's College, University of Oxford (5th January 2024), recipient of BSECS' Michael Burden Award
  • '"Real or Allegoric"?: Satanic and divine typology in Paradise Regained' — Thirteenth International Milton Symposium, University of Toronto (13th July 2023)
  • 'Purney's Fabulous Pastoral' — 'How Do Stories Shape Our World?': English Faculty Graduate Symposium, University of Cambridge (5th May 2023)
  • 'Making light of essays | Making essays of light' [revised], with a new introduction on the literary essay and metaphor — Errant Symposium, University of Lancaster (29th April 2023)
  • 'Puppet magic on the early modern stage' (with Dr Nicole Sheriko, Abraham Alsalihi, and Gregory Miller) — Cambridge Festival 2023, Judith E. Wilson Studio, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge (19th March 2023)
  • '"We should be kind | While there is still time": Larkin’s mediating machines' — 'Bad Habits of Expectancy': Towards Larkin 200, University of Hull (8-9th December 2022)
  • 'Hunting after the early modern essay' — Medieval and Renaissance Symposium, University of Lodz (20th September 2022)
  • 'Pastoral competition in Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village' — Oxford English Graduate Conference: 'Conversation(s)', University of Oxford (3rd June 2022)
  • 'The pastoral singing contest from Theocritus to Pope (and beyond)' — MSt in English (1700-1830) Conference: 'Connections', St Catherine's College, Oxford (24th May 2022)
  • 'Syncretic imitation: Langland and Latin in Spenser’s alliterative hexameters' (co-researched with Dr Archie Cornish) — Metre and Rhythm in Medieval and Early Modern English Poetry Conference, University of Padova (19th May 2022)