Staff Profile

Expertise

I work on early modern travel writing, interpreting that broadly, and my research uses both traditional methods of literary and historical analysis alongside digital humanities approaches such as social network analysis. My doctoral thesis was on Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, examining how the text functions as a textual network and how it reflects and created contemporary interests in travel and colonisation. I have published on topics including Hakluyt's religious beliefs, the structure of communities within his text, and its literary function and form, and I am currently working on a monograph based on this research. I was previously a member of the TIDE (Travel, Transculturality and Identity in England, c, 1550-1700) project based at University of Liverpool and from 2019, the University of Oxford. As a member of the project I contributed to our publications and external collaborations and I have continued this work: in 2021 I co-curated an exhibition at the Middle Temple Library in London, and in 2023 another exhibition at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. I am currently working on another monograph exploring the form and function of Indigenous language lists in European travel texts, as well as a wider research project studying the literary representation of merchant women in early modern English literature.

Biography

• BA (Hons) in English Literature, University of Warwick
• MA in Early Modern English Literature: Text and Transmission, King's College London
• DPhil in English Literature, University of Oxford
• Council Member of the Hakluyt Society
• Associate Fellow, Royal Historical Society

Previous Roles:

• Lecturer in Renaissance and Early Modern Literature, University of York
• Stipendiary Lecturer, Exeter College, University of Oxford
• Associate Lecturer, University of Reading

Research Interests

I am interested in how people wrote about and encountered their world in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. My research to date has primarily focused on travel writing, taking this definition broadly to bring diaries, letters and narratives as well as drama, visual imagery and material culture into my analysis. As well as historical and literary modes of analysis I have also used social network analysis in my research and have an interest in Digital Humanities methodologies and the development of the field. I have published articles which draw from this research in Cultural and Social History and Renaissance Studies on topics including Hakluyt’s religious views, the structure and social dynamics of English writers in the Levant, and the autobiography of Rose Lok, written in the early seventeenth century. I am currently working on a monograph based on my doctoral research which will combine historical, literary, and social network analysis to reassess the contexts surrounding Principal Navigations, as well as a monograph which will examine the role of indigenous language lists in early modern travel texts. I also have three forthcoming chapters in edited collections: ‘Englishing Strangers in Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations’ in ‘A World of Words’: Writing Distant Travels and Linguistic Otherness in Early Modern England (c. 1550-1660), ‘Travel Knowledge’ in The Oxford Handbook of Travel, Identity, and Race in Early Modern England, 1550–1700, and ‘Global Networks at the Early Modern Inns of Court’ in Mapping the Early Modern Inns of Court.

Current Work

Alongside writing my monograph, I am currently working on my next area of research examining the lives of ‘Citizen Wives’ in early modern England. Sixteenth century English cities were sites of rapid economic, cultural, and social development and merchants were key to this process, driving investment and expansion through their trading voyages. At home, English women connected to these communities were vital in fuelling socio-economic and cultural development, while overseas they acted as social agents whose cultural experience was markedly different from men. The trope of the ‘Citizen wife’ is thus a pressure point reflecting contemporary attitudes towards gender, travel, commerce, and cultural difference. My research into this area brings together multiple areas of existing scholarly interest in the period including life writing, women’s engagement in literary culture, and travel writing. I have already published an article in a Special Issue of Parergon in 2023 discussing an autobiography from 1610 as part of this research, and in January 2024 appeared in an episode of BBC Radio 3’s ‘Free Thinking’ programme discussing it.

This year I am teaching and lecturing on Shakespeare and Company: Gender, Power, Theatre, Beginnings, and Renaissance Bodies.