Assistant Professor

Email: Natalya dot Din-Kariuki at warwick dot ac dot uk

Humanities Building
University Road
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL

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About

Natalya Din-Kariuki is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies. She took her BA, MSt, and DPhil degrees at the University of Oxford. From 2016 to 2019, she was Lecturer in English at Worcester College, Oxford, where she taught literature from 1550 to 1830, including Shakespeare, as well as topics in critical theory and contemporary literature. She has held visiting fellowships at the University of Leeds, the Folger Institute in Washington, DC., and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.

Research interests

My research examines the literary and intellectual history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a particular focus on travel writing, transnational and transcultural encounters, modes of cosmopolitanism, and rhetoric and poetics. At present, I am completing my first book project, provisionally titled Peregrine Words: The Rhetoric of Seventeenth-Century English Travel Writing. The book argues that early modern English travellers drew on the habits and techniques of classical rhetoric to understand and describe their experiences. It reconstructs aspects of the humanist pedagogy that these writers encountered at school and university to show that they used this training in settings far removed from their classrooms. It presents a new reading of the formal and stylistic features of travel writing, and, in so doing, broadens the scope of what early modern 'literature' might be said to comprise. At the same time, it situates the texts under discussion within wider commercial, diplomatic, and patronage contexts, to examine the role that travellers played in the rise of the early modern English knowledge economy. Material emerging from this project appears in my chapter "'Strange accidents': navigating conflict in Sir Thomas Smithes voiage and entertainment in Rushia (1605)", in Travel and Conflict in the Early Modern World ed. Gábor Gelléri and Rachel Willie (2020), in my essay "Reading the Ottoman Empire: Intertextuality and Experience in Henry Blount's Voyage into the Levant (1636)" in The Review of English Studies (available open access here), and in my short piece on Thomas Coryate, the quirkiest traveller of them all, in Notes & Queries (available open access hereLink opens in a new window).

I have also written about early modern religious prose, including the sermons and lectures of Lancelot Andrewes. My essay "'This Musique Hath Life in It': Harmony in Lancelot Andrewes's Preaching" is published in the summer 2022 issue of The Huntington Library Quarterly, available here.

With Subha Mukherji and Rowan Williams, I am editing Migrant Knowledge: Thoughts and Responses, under contract with punctum books. This volume emerges from an event we co-convened (with Carla Suthren) at the University of Cambridge that brought together academics, artists, and activists to explore alternative ways of thinking and knowing about migration – of people, things, and ideas – rooted in the urgency of contemporary experience. More information about the event is available here, and there is a documentary of it here.

Teaching and supervision

In 2022-23, I am teaching on the modules Medieval to Renaissance English LiteratureLink opens in a new window and England and the Islamic World, 1550-1660, as well as giving lectures on Shakespeare and Selected Dramatists of His Time Link opens in a new windowand Literature in TheoryLink opens in a new window.

I would be very pleased to hear from potential graduate students interested in pursuing research in any of my areas of specialism.