Dr. Sophie Read
Biography
Sophie Read is Senior Lecturer in English Literature, 1640-1730. She was born in Oxford and educated at Queens' College, Cambridge, where she also did her graduate work; she has been a fellow of Christ's since 2006.
Research Interests
Seventeenth-century devotional poetry & sermons; renaissance rhetoric (particularly wordplay), poetics & cognitive linguistics; literary representations of the senses, particularly smell; contemporary (Cambridge-school) poetry.
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Publications
Books
(Editor) The Bible and Western Christian Literature: Books and The Book, Vol 2: Renaissance and Reformation (London: Bloomsbury, 2024)
Eucharist and the Poetic Imagination in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)
Chapters / articles
‘Eden and the Dream of Place in Renaissance England’, The Bible and Western Christian Literature, pp. 403-28
‘Rhetoric and Figurative Language’ in The Oxford History of Poetry in English, Vol 5: The Seventeenth Century, ed. Laura Lunger Knoppers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), pp. 136-48
‘Modernist Metaphysics: Empson, Donne and the Science of Feeling’, John Donne Journal, 37 (2019 [2023]), 97-122
'Pastoral: "Language-Landscape Linkage" in Michael Haslam's Verse', in Forms of Late Modernist Lyric, ed. Edward Allen (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021), pp. 55-78.
'Dryden's Debts: Criticism, Commerce and the Value of Wit', in The Places of Early Modern Criticism, eds Gavin Alexander, Emma Gilby and Andrew Marr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 219-31.
'"Floating Paper Worlds": Ian Patterson's Time Dust', in a small thing on the air: for & after Ian Patterson, ed. Josh Robinson (Privately Printed, 2020), pp. 134-52
‘Moving Words: Enargeia in Early Modern Devotions’, Cambridge Quarterly, 49 (2020), 33-54
‘What the Nose Knew: George Herbert’s “Speaking Sweet” and Renaissance Theologies of Smell’, in Knowing Faith: Literature, Belief and Knowledge in Early Modern England, ed. Subha Mukherji et al (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018), pp. 175-94
‘Shakespeare and the Arts of Cognition’, in The Oxford Handbook to Shakespeare’s Poetry, ed. Jonathan F. S. Post (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 62-77
‘Ambergris and Early Modern Rhetorics of Scent’, The Seventeenth Century, 28 (June 2013), 221-37
‘Rhetoric and Rethinking in Bentley’s Paradise Lost’, Cambridge Quarterly, 41 (2012), 209-28
‘Punning and Identity in Swift’, Swift Studies, 26 (2011), 38-60
‘Acts of Articulation: Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Allusion’, Kenyon Review online special issue, December 2009 (https://kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/index-2/selections/veronica-forrest-thomsons-acts-of-articulation/)
‘Lancelot Andrewes’s Sacramental Wordplay’, Cambridge Quarterly, 36 (2007), 1-21