Michael Powell-Davies

Michael completed his BA in English Literature at the University of Sheffield in 2017 before completing his MA in Early Modern English Literature: Text and Transmission at King’s College London in partnership with the British Library the following year. In 2019, Michael began his PhD research at the University of Kent, undertaking a studentship attached to the AHRC-funded project The Cultural Lives of the Middling Sort, Writing and Material Culture, 1560-1660. 

Michael also spent time studying abroad, undertaking a year at the University of New Mexico, USA, and a summer term at Seoul National University, South Korea.

He is supervised by Professor Catherine Richardson and Professor Bernhard Klein.

Michael’s doctoral research explores the cultural lives of early modern Stepney’s land-based middling sort. Focussing on narrative practices and the self-conscious authoring of place and people, Michael’s research investigates how Stepney’s middling sort used objects of textual and administrative culture to navigate, and attempt to secure, their positions within the parish’s mobile maritime communities. 

Thesis title

Working Title: Authorship of People and Place in the Middling Cultures of Maritime Stepney, 1580-1640