Staff Profile

I joined Newcastle University as a Research Associate in 2007 to work on the AHRC-funded edition of The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick and progressed to a full lecturer role in 2010. I am now a Senior Lecturer in seventeenth-century Literature. I have served in a variety of roles including Subject Head for Literature, Athena-Swan lead (we successfully renewed our bronze award in 2021), EDI officer, and I am now Admissions Officer for the School.

I did my PhD at University College Cork on early modern Irishwomen's lifewriting under the supervision of Professor Pat Coughlan.

Research

My research interests lie in the extraordinary and rich field of seventeenth-century literature and history. I specialise in poetry and in women's writing and thought, particularly women's life-writing (letters and diaries) and political writing. I have edited the works of two major poets of the period, Ben Jonson and Robert Herrick, and am a contributing editor to the online edition of Hester Pulter's poetry. My most recent work is on the 'people' in early modern women's writing, on notions of waste and writing in Jonson's 'On the Famous Voyage' and ideas of innocence and experience in Greta Gerwig's Barbie (2023). With Dorothy Kim, I am a co-editor of the Early Medieval to Early Modern section of Literature Compass and welcome all queries about potential submissions.

I am in the final stages of a monograph on the politics and affects of poetry in the immediate post-civil war period. It considers the civil war afterlife of Ben Jonson, the post-war poetry of Richard Lovelace and Hester Pulter's poetic self-fashioning. I read these writings in the context of the debates over the role and status of lyric in the post-war period, especially the hostility to lyric in work by Abraham Cowley and articulated by William Davenant and Thomas Hobbes in The Preface to Gondibert.

I am also co-editing a cross-period and cross-disciplinary study of the country house and estate with Professor Annie Tindley, entitled Culture, Capital and the Country House, under contract to Manchester UP.

I am currently supervising Ph.D projects that reconstruct the library of James VI and I; analyse apprenticeship networks with the Stationers' Company; study early modern women's religious writing and examine how value is assigned to imagine and creative writing in the early modern London print marketplace. All of these are AHRC-funded through the Northern Bridge consortium. I welcome projects on any aspect of early modern poetry, women's writing, and print history, including editing projects including collaborative and cross-disciplinary PhDs that work with external partners. I have been involved in several successful applications with the Stationers' Company and the National Library of Scotland.

 I have taught extensively across the UG and PGT curriculum at Newcastle and currently teach on the specialist early modern module, Renaissance Bodies, at Stage 2 and on a cross-disciplinary and cross-period module on the country house at Stage 3. I teach early modern poetry, prose and drama and the early modern letter. I have a special interest in born-digital assessments and in assessing through project-based learning. My Stage 3 dissertation option trains students in using the digital storytelling platform, Shorthand, to curate a digital exhibition. This teaching is supported by colleagues in Special Collections in the Philip Robinson Library and staff at the National Library of Scotland who provide a masterclass in exhibition curation.

Undergraduate

Stage 3

SEL 3444: Envious Show: Wealth, Power, Ambition and the Country House.

SEL 3405: Dissertation by Digital Exhibition

Stage 2

SEL 2201: Renaissance Bodies

Stage 1

SEL 1035: Beginnings

• Articles

  • Connolly R. "Innocence and Experience in Barbie". Feminist Theory 2024, 25(4), 649-654.
  • Connolly R. Hester Pulter's Childbirth Poetics. Women's Writing 2019, 26(3), 282-303.
  • Connolly R, McAreavey N. Introduction: The literatures of early modern Ireland. Literature Compass 2018, 15(10), e12490.
  • Connolly R. New modelled cavaliers. The Seventeenth Century 2017, 32(4), 321-325.
  • Connolly R. Bestiaries of feeling: flies, snails, toads and spiders in Richard Lovelace’s Lucasta: PosthumePoems (1659). The Seventeenth Century 2017, 32(4), 473-491.
  • Connolly R. Editing Intention in the Manuscript Poetry of Robert Herrick. Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 2012, 52(1), 69-84.
  • Connolly R. New Approaches to the Work of Robert Herrick. Literature Compass 2009, 6(6), 1177-1187.
  • Connolly R. A Proselytising Protestant Commonwealth: The Religious and Political Ideals of Katherine Jones, Viscountess Ranelagh (1614-1691). The Seventeenth Century 2008, 23(2), 244-264.
  • Connolly R. A Manuscript Treatise of Viscountess Ranelagh (1614-1691). Notes and Queries 2006, 53(2), 170-172.

• Authored Book

  • Connolly R. Bodily Imaginings: The Somatic in Seventeenth-Century Poetry. 2025. In Preparation.

• Book Chapters

  • Connolly R. The People in Royalist Women's Writing. In: Andrew Hadfield and Paul Hammond, ed. Words at War: The Contested Language of the English Civil War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024, pp.208-220.
  • Connolly R. The Politics of Honor in Lady Ranelagh's Ireland. In: Eckerle JA; McAreavey N, ed. Women's Life Writing and Early Modern Ireland. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2019, pp.137-158.
  • Connolly R. 'The Sons of Ben'. In: Eugene Giddens, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Ben Jonson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. In Press.
  • Windram HF, Howe CJ, Connolly R. Thinking 'bibliogeographically': Phylogenetic analyses and systems of manuscript circulation. In: Beal, P, ed. Discovering, Identifying and Editing Early Modern Manuscripts. London: British Library, 2013, pp.215-251.
  • Connolly R. 'Robert Herrick', 'Mary Rich' and 'Lady Jane Cavendish'. In: Blackwell Renaissance Encyclopedia. Routledge, 2012. In Preparation.
  • Connolly R. Print, Miscellaneity and the Reader in Robert Herrick's Hesperides. In: Allen, G., Griffin, C., O'Connell, M, ed. Readings on Audience and Textual Materiality. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011.
  • Connolly R. Introduction: Community and Conviviality in the Works of Robert Herrick. In: Connolly, R; Cain, T, ed. Lords of Wine and Oile : Community and Conviviality in the Poetry of Robert Herrick. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011.
  • Connolly R, Cain T. 'Herrick's Communities of Manuscript and Print'. In: Cain, T., Connolly, R, ed. Lords of Wine and Oile: Community and Conviviality in the Poetry of Robert Herrick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
  • Connolly R. Viscountess Ranelagh and the Authorisation of Women's Knowledge in the Hartlib Circle. In: Harris, J; Scott-Baumann, E, ed. The Intellectual Culture of Puritan Women, 1558-1680. London: Palgrave Macmillian, 2010, pp.150-161.
  • Connolly R. 'A Wise and Godly Sybilla':Viscountess Ranelagh and the Politics of International Protestantism. In: Brown, S, ed. Women, Gender and Radical Religion in Early Modern Europe. Leiden: Brill, 2007, pp.285-306.

• Edited Books

  • Connolly R, Tindley A, ed. Capital, Culture and the Country House. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2026. In Preparation.
  • Connolly R, ed. New modelled cavaliers [Special edited issue of The Seventeenth Century]. Routledge, 2017.
  • Cain T, Connolly R, ed. Lords of Wine and Oile: Community and Conviviality in the Poetry of Robert Herrick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

• Scholarly Editions

  • Connolly R, Cain T. The Poems of Ben Jonson. In: Hammond P; Hopkins D ed. Longman Annotated English Poets 2022. London: Routledge, 1276.
  • Cain TS, Connolly R. The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick: Volume 2. The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick 2013. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2, 864.
  • Cain TS, Connolly R. The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick: Volume 1. The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick 2013. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1, 504.