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Staff Profile

Dr Ruth Connolly

Senior Lecturer

  • Telephone: +44 (0) 191 208 8133
Background

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
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 and on notions of waste and writing in Jonson's 'On the Famous Voyage'.


I am currently 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 ot lyric in work by Abraham Cowley and articulated by William Davenant and Thomas Hobbes in The Preface to Gondibert.

 

Arising from work on the material and publication history of Herrick's Hesperides, I acquired an interest in book history. My current book history project focuses on the history of selling and reading print in Newcastle in the seventeenth century. I am a member of Print Networks, the research group for studies of the British Book trade, and serve on the publications committee of the Newcastle Society of Antiquaries.


I am also developing a cross-period and cross-disciplinary study of the country house and estate. This latter project has grown from my work on aristocratic women's life-writing and on the poetry of Jonson and Herrick and is currently informing new teaching and a projected edited collection developed jointly with colleagues in History.


I am currently supervising Ph.D projects that reconstruct the library of James VI and I, analyse apprenticeship networks with the Stationers' Company, and study early modern women's religious writing. 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. I am also involved in the co-supervision of creative writing PhD projects that draw on elements of the early modern past. I am also interested in collaborative and cross-disciplinary PhDs that work with external partners and have been involved in several successful applications with the Stationers' Company and the National Library of Scotland.




Teaching

 I have taught extensively across the UG and PGT curriculum at Newcastle. I teach early modern poetry, prose and drama and contemporary Irish literature. 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. Staff at the National Library of Scotland who provide a masterclass in exhibition curation. I co-teach a PGT module, Manuscript, Print, Digital that teaches students paleographical, editorial and text-encoding skills though their work on a collaborative project to edit a late seventeenth century Northumberland recipe book.


I am currently co-teaching a cross-period, interdisciplinary module on the country house and estate and am developing another cross-period module on war-writing.


Undergraduate


Stage 3

SEL 3444: Envious Show: Wealth, Power, Ambition and the Country House, 1550-2000.

SEL 3405: Dissertation by Digital Exhibition

SEL 3442: War Writing: Heroic and Hostile Discourses in Medieval Literature (running in 2025)



Stage 2

SEL 2201: Renaissance Bodies


Stage 1

SEL 1004: Introduction to Literary Studies 1


MA teaching

SEL 8543: Manuscript, Print, Digital

Publications