Matt Ryan
Doctoral Student in Literature - Matt’s thesis is entitled ‘Community Values: Staging Connections in the Late Sixteenth Century Print Trade'
Research Project Title:
Community Values: Staging Connections in the Late Sixteenth Century Print Trade
Supervisors:
Dr Ruth Connolly, Dr Jane Nolan. Dr Kate De Rycker + Prof Kate Chedgzoy
Contact Details:
Email: m.ryan2@newcastle.ac.uk
Research Interests:
- Early modern prose fiction
- Early modern book history
- Authorial self-fashioning in sixteenth century literature
- Representations of penury and precarity
- Network science and the future of work
Brief Outline of Research Project:
Offering a new literary history of the Elizabethan print trade, my project will argue that those working in the early modern book industry staged connections, factions, and rivalries in their work to negotiate unanswered questions of economic, social, and cultural value in the period.
My thesis will bring letters, court records, and entries from Stationers’ Company court books together with the work of writers like Thomas Nashe, Henry Chettle, and William Baldwin to explore what these texts tell us about the collaborative-competitive dynamics of the late sixteenth century print trade, and the ever-evolving definitions of print, and professional authorship in the period.
Publications:
Journal articles:
- ‘Thinking through Community: Navigating Precarity in the Sixteenth-century Print Trade’, English: Journal of the English Association, Volume 73, Issue 282, Autumn 2024, pp. 111–124
- ‘Fleeting moments: art and exhibition-making in Cork Prison,’ Museum Ireland vol. 31 (forthcoming, 2025).
Blogs
- ‘The queen, her godson, and his secret: The hidden lives of Sir John Harington,’ RTÉ Brainstorm, May 2025 [forthcoming]
- ‘Shakespeare’s forgotten publisher: The curious disappearance of Edward Blount,’ Doing History in Public, October 2024
- ‘Strength in adversity: The hidden stories of two Cambridge Martins,’ Cambridge University Library Special Collections blog, July 2024.
- ‘Hiding in plain sight: The secret life of Martin Marprelate,’ Northern Early Modern Network blog, June 2024.
Reviews
- Borrowed Feathers by Darren Freebury-Jones Epoch Magazine (issue 18, December 2024)
- Straight Acting by Will Tosh, History Today (vol. 74, issue 9, Sept 2024)
Exhibitions
- with/out, Spike Island Museum, Cork (May-August 2025)
- All Eyes on Us, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork (November 2023-March 2024)
Conferences
- ‘Unquiet Spryttes: Martin Marprelate and his tactics of resistance,’ SHARP conference, (Reading University, July 2024)
- ‘At Wolfe’s Kitchin: Print communities in the 1590s,’ Printing Centres and their Peripheries conferece (National Library of Lithuania, Vilnius; October, 2023)
- ‘So ends the Ceremony of the Day: The performance of renewal in Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises,’’ Postgraduate conference, (Newcastle University, June 2023)
- ‘It did make Powle's churchyard resound: Building community in the sixteenth and twenty-first century creative industries,’ Northern Early Modern Network Conference (Durham University and Strathclyde University, May 2023)
- ‘Intergenerational Collaboration in Early Modern Recipe Books’ at the Newberry Graduate Conference (Newberry Library, USA; January 2022)
Memberships and Outreach Projects
Memberships
Postgraduate fellow of the Royal History Society
Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP)
The Bibliographical Society
Outreach Projects
‘Beyond the Frame’: Outreach project undertaken Cork Prison, in conjunction with Crawford Art Gallery.