Manuscript and Print Cultures

Research Group Members

Prof Teresa Grant is Professor of Renaissance Theatre and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance. She teaches on the degree programmes in English and History, English and English and Theatre and on the MA in English and Drama (of which she is the convenor). She is General Editor (with Eugene Giddens and Barbara Ravelhofer) of the Oxford University Press 15 volume The Complete Works of James Shirley.

Dr Jen Baker (ECLS) researches nineteenth-century Anglophone death cultures and the Gothic - particularly relating to the child - and more broadly on the novel form, the short form, gothic illustration and gothic publishing, paratexts and epitexts, and more contemporary considerations of "the book" such as Gothic pop-up and other movable ephemera.

Dr Sarah Wood is Associate Professor in Middle English in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies. She has published extensively on the manuscripts and textual tradition of Piers Plowman.

Professor Ingrid De Smet (SMLC) regularly works with manuscripts and rare books in her research on the intellectual culture of early modern France, the Low Countries, and Italy; She has taught postgraduate classes on working with manuscripts and rare books, and early modern print culture; and supervise PhD students working with manuscripts and print. Among my current (co-)supervisees in this area is work on Sergei (Zotov) (alchemical manuscripts) and Karin (Sprang) (alba amicorum).

Prof. Paul Botley (ECLS) My research interests include the classical tradition in early modern literature; renaissance letters; neo-Latin literature; Erasmus; the history of the Bible; education in the renaissance; translation; the Greek diaspora in renaissance Europe; editorial method; and the history of scholarship. My earliest work, and my first two books, focussed on Byzantine and Italian literature of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. My current research centres on the northern European renaissance of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and focusses on collections of letters.

Dr Jane Webb (School for Cross-Faculty Studies) has research interests around the lives of objects in museum and personal collections, of which the paper correspondence of donors has been of major interest. Her recently published book chapter for Memories of Dress: Recollections of Material Identities (Bloomsbury 2023) tried to unearth why three dresses had been kept for 150 years before being donated to one museum using the letters of donors to the museum, and hand-written accounts and letters in other archives.

Dr John West (ECLS): My research interests include seventeenth-century literature, especially of the Civil Wars and Restoration; early modern literature and politics; and early modern literature and religion. My first book was about enthusiasm in the works of the Restoration poet, dramatist and literary critic John Dryden. I am continuing my work on Dryden with an essay about his role as Poet Laureate.

Prof. Ralph Hanna is Professor Emeritus of Palaeography at the University of Oxford. His books include Introducing Medieval Book History: Manuscripts, their Producers and their Readers (Liverpool, 2013) and Looking at Medieval Books: Learning to See (Liverpool, 2023).

Prof. John Gilmore (ECLS): English and Caribbean literature, especially of the long eighteenth century; classical receptions; Neo-Latin literature, especially poetry; translations into Latin; manuscript circulation of modern Latin texts.

Dr David Coates (TPS) is a cultural historian working on British theatre, amateur theatre, performance and entertainment histories of the long nineteenth century. He is interested in the material traces of theatre from the period, including playbills, published plays, acting editions, newspapers, illustrated news, theatre guidebooks and scrapbooks.

Dr Anna Lanfranchi (SMLC) is a teaching fellow in Translation and transcultural studies and Italian. Her research focuses on transnational publishing history, history of copyright and literary agents, book programmes and cultural diplomacy.

Dr Nancy Haijing Jiang (CSR)

Prof. Brenda Hosington is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Centre for Renaissance Studies. Her major area of research is translation history and theory, with a particular focus on the relationship between translation and print in early modern England (Editor in chief of one online catalogue of printed translations (1473-1640) and Co-editor of another (1641-1660) forthcoming). She also publishes on women translators, many of whom produced translations in manuscript, and on Neo-Latin translations and their print history.

Dr Jack Bowman is a current tutor in the History department and recently finished his PhD at Warwick. His research focuses on anti-colonial print networks and political thought in the twentieth-century, with a current focus on Pan-Africanism. He has a recent article upon Indian independence activist V. K. Krishna Menon and his role as an editor in Britain (during which he, among other things, helped found Pelican Books!) now out in The Historical Journal. 

Dr Ania Crowther is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Centre for Renaissance Studies and completed her PhD at Warwick in 2018 on James Shirley and the Restoration Stage with a particular focus on the relationship between the manuscript and print versions of Shirley’s The Court Secret. Her work is largely on promptbooks and manuscript edits to Seventeenth-century drama and she is currently editing Youth’s Glory and Death’s Banquet for the Complete Works of Margaret Cavendish project.

Dr Jessica Wardhaugh (SMLC) is a Reader in French Studies, and works on the relationship between politics and culture in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France. She has published books on street politics and political theatre, as well as on ideas of community and democracy. Her current book project explores political play in its verbal, visual, and physical forms, and she is particularly interested in the material and print cultures of popular politics, including posters, flyers, graffiti, and political ephemera.

Madeleine Bracey is a PhD student at Coventry University working on the long lost Coventry Grammar School Library. She is supervised by Dr Alice Leonard (Coventry) and mentored by Prof. Paul Botley (Warwick).

Dr Alice Leonard is a specialist in the culture and history of error in early modern England. She is interested in how perceptions of error manifested and changed during this period, in epistemological contexts such as natural philosophy, travel and navigation. In 2023, she was a British Library Eccles Fellow to conduct archival research for my second monograph in this area. She is co-editor on the Notebooks volume of The Complete Works of Thomas Browne (OUP) and is also working on a short book entitled Early Modern Bookspace, under contract with Cambridge University Press.

Dr William Rupp is Associate Professor and Head of Liberal Arts. After completing his doctoral studies in history at Warwick, William has worked in outreach and as an academic developer. His research is focused mainly on travel and national identity creation in eighteenth-century Britain but he has also worked technology adoption and social control in the latter part of the nineteenth century.