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The University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NZ, T +44 (0)1227 764000
Staff
The Director of the Centre is Dr Alixe Bovey
Staff affiliated with the centre:
Dr Anne Alwis (Classical and Archaeological Studies): Late Antiquity and Byzantium, in particular, the study of Hagiography (the Lives of Saints): transmission, translation, social, literary and cultural contexts; Greek palaeography; Gender Studies; Narrative.
Dr Paul Bennett (Director of Canterbury Archaeological Trust): archaeology of Canterbury and its hinterland.
Dr Barbara Bombi (History): Ecclesiastical and religious history, 1200-1400; canon law and history of the Medieval papacy; crusades and history of the Military Orders; Anglo-papal relations in the fourteenth century; Latin diplomatic and palaeography.
Dr Alixe Bovey (History): I am a specialist in the visual culture of the later Middle Ages. My background is interdisciplinary: I received a BA in History and Medieval Studies from the University of Victoria in British Columbia (1995), before obtaining a M.A. (1996) and a Ph.D. (2000) from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. I began my career as a curator in the Department of Manuscripts at the British Library, before coming to the University of Kent in 2005. My current research projects are the completion of a monograph on the Smithfield Decretals, a 14th century law book illuminated in London; and a book about the Carpentin Hours, an astonishing prayer book that was illuminated by the Master of the Dresden Prayer Book in Bruges in the early 1470s. I convene the MA module ‘Reading the Evidence’, and teach the option ‘The Gothic Imagination: English Art and Literature in the Later Middle Ages’ with Sarah James. I am currently supervising six research students, and I am happy to hear from prospective students with an interest in the art and culture of the later Middle Ages.
Professor Peter Brown (English): I am about to finish a book for Oxford University Press on Geoffrey Chaucer for their Authors in Context series. My previous book was Chaucer and the Making of Optical Space (Peter Lang, 2007). I am editor of the Blackwell Companion to Chaucer (2000) and Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture (2007). My interests focus on late medieval English literature and the cultural circumstances (political, artistic, religious, scientific) in which it is embedded. A current project, under way with Charles University, Prague, is called ‘Chaucer in Bohemia’. It is exploring the transmission of ideas between Czech and English culture following the marriage of Anne of Bohemia to King Richard in 1381. At present I convene for the MA programme a module on Chaucer and Gower, and contribute to Manuscript and to Reading the Evidence.
Dr Rosanna Cox (English): Political thought, culture and literature in the mid-to-late 17th century; John Milton; early modern statecraft and diplomacy; gender, politics and reading; education and the English universities from the mid-16th century
Professor Kenneth Fincham (History): English political and religious history in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; early modern English architecture. Publications include Prelate as Pastor: The Episcopate of James I (Clarendon Press, 1990), and The Early Stuart Church 1603-1642 (Macmillan, 1993).
Dr Helen Gittos (History): I am interested in all aspects of Anglo-Saxon society, and medieval liturgy and architecture more generally. My first book examines aspects of pre-Conquest liturgy and what it indicates about how rituals were performed, and how churches were used and experienced. I am currently beginning new research into the use of vernacular languages in the medieval liturgy. I welcome enquiries from students wanting to work on any related topic. Author of Liturgy and Architecture in Anglo-Saxon England (forthcoming); co-editor of The Liturgy of the Late Anglo-Saxon Church (2005); convenor of the AHRC-funded International Research Network on Interpreting Medieval Liturgy, and the MA option Early Medieval Archaeology: Europe after Rome AD 410-846. Click here is the link to 'Interpreting Medieval Liturgy' project website.
Dr David Grummitt (History) is a historian of late-medieval and early Tudor England. He has published extensively on war, politics and administration in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. His books include The Calais Garrison: war and military service in England 1436-1558 (Woodbridge, 2008) and, co-authored with Steven Gunn, War and Society in England and the Habsburg Netherlands, 1477-1559 (Oxford, 2009). He has just completed A Short History of the Wars of the Roses (London, 2012) and has been commissioned by Routledge to write a new biography of Henry VI. His research students study the politics of vernacular letter writing in the fifteenth century and Reformation Canterbury and he welcomes enquiries from prospective students from across the period 1400-1600.
Dr Sarah James (English): My research interests are centred around theological writing in the later Middle Ages, asking questions about the ways in which medieval writers engaged with the religious debates of the day, and how ordinary people, for the most part with very limited access to written texts, experienced religion. The visual culture of the Middle Ages, exemplified in illuminated manuscripts and church architecture and decoration, is an important influence on my thinking, as indeed it was for medieval writers themselves. Many of the texts I work with are unprinted, and the opportunity to work with manuscripts is, for me, one of the great pleasures of being a medievalist.
A historicist and close reader by instinct and training, I find myself increasingly interested in exploring how far methodologies from other disciplines might illuminate my work. I am currently writing a book which draws upon sociological and anthropological theories of identity and boundaries to explore the ways in which people imagined religious identity in fifteenth-century East Anglia. I am also working on an edition of Middle English versions of the Elucidarium, a highly influential Latin theological text.
I welcome graduate students in any of my areas of interest. I am currently supervising doctoral students working on the cultural construction of kingship in the late Middle Ages, and on the relationships between image and text in medieval manuscripts.
Optional modules: The Gothic Imagination (team-taught with Alixe Bovey) and Encountering the Holy (team-taught with Barbara Bombi). I run the Intensive Latin Start-Up course for incoming MA students. As Deputy Director of the Centre I am convener of all MA skills modules.
Dr Andy Kesson (English) I'm a lecturer in early modern studies at Kent and an advisor and guest lecturer at Shakespeare's Globe. I've worked as a teacher in primary and secondary schools and at the Royal Shakespeare Company, the CAPITAL Centre at Warwick University, the University of Birmingham and King's College, London. I've also worked as an administrator for Contact Theatre, Manchester, and for the BBC's Write Years Ahead new writing scheme.
My research focuses on literature, performance and cultural theory, particularly in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. I'm currently working on my first monograph, John Lyly and Early Modern Authorship (MUP, 2013), which celebrates the importance of Shakespeare's best-selling and now largely forgotten contemporary. Working with Lyly has been lots of fun and I'm looking forward to unleashing the results soon. I'm also editing a collection of essays with Emma Smith (Hertford College, Oxford), entitled The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2013). This volume rethinks the Elizabethan canon by placing now-famous writers, such as Shakespeare and Donne, alongside books and printed texts that were much more popular in the period itself: maternity manuals, sermons, romances, proclamations, poetry collections and Bibles. I hope that both these books will enable a view of the early modern period that is both historically rigorous and yet new. Whilst finishing these two books, I'm engaged in a new research project with Steve Purcell (Warwick University) and the Pantaloons theatre company exploring the ways language produces gesture onstage.
At Kent I teach on the BA modules Elizabethan Drama, Jacobean Drama and Early Modern Literature, and lecture for Early Drama and Romanticism and Critical Theory. I teach and co-convene an MA module, Shakespeare and Material Culture, and teach the core Medieval and Early Modern MA module, Reading the Evidence. I'm currently supervising a doctoral thesis on Nashe and Aretino, part of my work in support of the new international doctoral programme, TEEME (Text and Event in Early Modern Europe): www.teemeurope.eu. I'm involved with the wider teaching community across the county, finding ways to help teachers and students discover Shakespeare together. In this capacity I've recently run a set of workshops at Brompton Academy, Gillingham for GCSE students, and will be giving a series of mini-lectures in support of National Schools Film Week. At the Globe I give public workshops and lectures, and am especially involved with the Read Not Dead series: www.shakespearesglobe.com/education[2].
Professor Bernhard Klein (English) Early modern literature and culture, travel writing, mapping and cartography, issues of space and place, maritime culture. My long-term research project deals with the early modern sea as a historical space and cultural contact zone. Currently I am co-editing a volume for the critical edition of Richard Hakluyt's massive compilation of travel accounts, The Principal Navigations of the English Nation, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2014. My publications in early modern studies include Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2001) Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain (co-ed., Cambridge University Press, 2001; reissued in paperback 2010) Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean (co-ed., Routledge, 2004), and many essays and book chapters on early modern topics. I convene an MA module on Early Modern Travel Writing and contribute to the core module Reading the Evidence.
Dr Luke Lavan (Classical and Archaeological Studies): Everyday use of space in the late antique and early medieval city (AD 300-700) drawing on archaeological, textual and epigraphic evidence from across the Roman Empire.
Dr Marion O'Connor (English):I have enduring interests in: theatrical reconstructions and dramatic revivals (especially twentieth-century productions and adaptations of Tudor and Stuart drama); iconography (especially maps and moral emblems); drama as historiography; censorship; and the 16th-century recovery of Anglo-Saxon language and texts. I have lately contributed an essay on Lucy Harington Russell, 3rd Countess of Bedford, to The Intellectual Culture of Puritan Women, a collection edited by Johanna Harris and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (Palgrave Macmillan 2010), and I am writing about William Poel for Continuum’s Great Shakespeareans series. Most of my recent work, however, has been informed by a concern to widen the availability of Jacobean and Caroline playtexts and thereby to help redefine the field of Early Modern English drama and theatre studies. My edition of a masque written by Lady Rachel Fane for performance in 1627 at Apethorpe Hall appeared in ELR in 2006, and I am preparing the rest of her adolescent dramatic œuvre for a Malone Society Miscellany volume. Having edited The Witch for the Oxford University Press Collected Works of Thomas Middleton (2007) and then The Court Beggar and The Queen’s Exchange for the online edition of the Collected Plays of Richard Brome [http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/brome] (2010), I am now editing A Woman Killed with Kindness and The Wise Woman of Hoxton for the Oxford University Press Collected Works of Thomas Heywood. Currently General Editor of Society for Theatre Research Publications, from 1997 to 2009 I was co-editor of Theatre Notebook, for which I am now an advisory editor, and I am also on the editorial boards of Early Theatre and Shakespeare.
Professor David Ormrod (History) Specialises in early modern economic and social history, focusing on overseas trade, the economy of Kent and the south-east, and relations with the Low Countries. Recent publications include The Rise of Commercial Empires. England and the Netherlands in the Age of Mercantilism (Cambridge, 2003) and Art Markets in Europe, 1400-1800, Aldershot, 1998 (edited with Michael North). He is currently completing a book on the Origins of the London Art Market, 1600-1800.
Dr Ryan Perry (English) I am interested in a generically wide range of Middle English textual cultures, but with a particular focus on historiographical literature, and pastoral/ affective writings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. I am especially interested in late medieval manuscripts containing English texts, and methodologies which explore the axis between textual and material culture. My recent and forthcoming publications have focused on miscellaneous devotional manuals and on books containing lives of Christ.
Dr David Potter (History) Interests are early modern France; the state and local society in the 15th and 16th centuries; the impact of war; the French aristocracy in the 16th century; and Renaissance diplomacy. He has published articles on French politics, diplomacy and the nobility in the 16th century in many learned journals. His most recent publications are War and Government in the French Provinces: Picardy 1470-1560 (1993), and A History of France, 1460-1560 (1995).
Dr Catherine Richardson (English)I work within and also somewhere between the disciplines of literature and history, on early modern daily life and material culture both on and off the stage. I have edited collections of essays on Clothing Culture 1350 - 1650 (2004) and Everyday Objects: medieval and early modern material culture and its meanings (2010 with Tara Hamling), and a significant area of interest has been the domestic dynamics of early modern plays, on which I’ve published, amongst other things, Domestic Life and Domestic Tragedy: the material life of the household, (2006). I have two current projects, one a study of the discourses of non-elite clothing in early modern England – what people wore and how they discussed their clothing in terms of display and disguise, which uses extant objects and documentary records to answer those questions. The other project is about oral narratives, and it tries to recover the story telling practices of ordinary early modern men and women and the influences on them from printed narratives. Like most of my work, these projects draw on extensive archival research, not least in our unparalleled archives in Canterbury Cathedral. I teach on Reading the Evidence in the Centre, and an option on Shakespeare and Material Culture, and have supervised research work on everything from early modern account books, the formation of communities or military culture to the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. I’m especially happy to supervise interdisciplinary projects.
Dr Sheila Sweetinburgh (English) : English social history, especially from the Black Death to the Reformation; medieval hospitals; piety and charity; the parish community; urban society and civic ritual; the medieval peasantry; linking history and archaeology. Publications include The Role of the Hospital in Medieval England: Gift-giving and the Spiritual Econony (2004).
Dr Ben Thomas (History and Philosophy of Art): Italian Renaissance art; Renaissance writing on the visual arts; sixteenth and seventeenth-century prints