A brief introduction to members of the Renaissance Research Group in the Department of English, University of Exeter.
Dr. Pascale Aebischer, the author of Shakespeare’s Violated Bodies: Stage and Screen Performance (CUP, 2004), works on Shakespeare, feminist performance studies and Jacobean drama. She is currently analysing the criticism of Jacobean drama in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and researching a book on Shakespeare’s role in Victorian theatrical memoirs.
Dr. Karen Edwards is currently working on the culture of vituperative insult in Civil War polemics, a project developing from her first book, Milton and the Natural World: Science and Poetry in ‘Paradise Lost’ (CUP, 1999), and her ongoing work on the presence of political, satiric, and ‘scientific’ animals in the works of Milton and other early modern writers.
Dr. Marion Gibson has written extensively on texts connected by an interest in magic and witchcraft in literature, especially popular literature. Her most recent publications are Possession, Puritanism and Print (on the sensational exorcisms of the puritan activist John Darrell 1586-97) and Witchcraft Myths in American Culture (on America’s obsession with witches 1620-present). She has recently received a major AHRC award for a project focusing on representations of the British pagan past.
Dr. Elliot Kendall works on the great household and late medieval writers’ engagement with its social dynamics and power (royal and aristocratic). In Lordship and Literature: John Gower and the Politics of the Great Household (OUP, 2008) he focuses on the great household and Gower’s Confessio Amantis, and he is currently working on the household imagination of politics from before the Wars of the Roses to the reign of Henry VIII.
Professor Gerald Maclean’s research explores how seventeenth-century English writing of all kinds – poetic, historical, dramatic, polemical – contributed to the emergence of national identities. The Rise of Oriental Travel (2004) and Looking East (2007) examine ways imperial ambitions took shape from encounters with the Ottoman Empire, while ‘Britain and the Muslim World’ (in progress) explores Anglo-Islamic relations in the age before ‘Orientalism.’
Professor Nicholas McDowell’s research interests lie in literary, cultural and intellectual history of 17th-century England, specializing in literature and the English Civil Wars, Milton, and Marvell. His new monograph, Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars, will be published in 2008 and he is editing Milton’s 1649 prose. He is a recent winner of a Philip Leverhulme Prize.
Professor Andrew McRae’s books include Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State (CUP, 2004). He is particularly interested in politics and literature, and the literature of space and place, but more generally with the interface between literature and history. He is currently working on literature and domestic travel in early modern England.
Dr. Edward Paleit specialises in the literary and intellectual culture of pre-Restoration England. He is particularly interested in the early modern reception and negotiation of antiquity, and therefore in the literary practices associated with Renaissance humanism (reading, composition, translation, imitation). He is currently writing a book entitled War, Liberty and Caesar, on English responses to the Latin poet Lucan from 1590 to 1640.
Dr. Henry Power’s interests include the literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (especially the period c. 1640-1760), the origins and antecedents of the English novel, and the reception of classical texts and ideas by English writers. One of his currents projects, for which he has been awarded a two-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, is a study of the reception of Virgil’s poetry during the English Civil War.
Professor Philip Schwyzer has written extensively on Shakespeare and Spenser. He is particularly interested in how Renaissance writers imagine and interact with the ancient and medieval past. His books include Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature (OUP, 2007) and Literature, Nationalism and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (CUP, 2004). He was recently awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for his current project, Shakespeare and the Remains of Richard III.
