PhD (Padua), Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy

Research Interests

My research has thus far focused on many aspects of early modern English culture, including topographical poetry, literature and painting, royal and civic festivals, literature and the sea, cartography, ideas of nationhood, iconography, antiquarianism, representations of royalty, and the reception of medieval national myths in the sixteenth century.

My Leverhulme project -- which will result in a book entitled Royal Genealogy in the Age of Shakespeare -- was triggered by the casual discovery of understudied manuscript and printed documents providing visual or textual royal pedigrees of Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, and James I. Key questions in the project are the function of biblical and fabulous ancestry in royal pedigrees; the monarch's perception of his/her own ancestry; genealogical practice in the world of the aristocracy and the gentry; and, in general, the use of royal genealogy as a lingua franca for public political debate but also as a means of communicating with the monarch through petitioning and gift-exchange.

 

Robert Cooke, Genealogy of Queen Elizabeth, BL King's 396, f. 24v.

In addition to the current Leverhulme ECF I have held a Caird Senior Research Fellowship at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich (2010-11), an IAS Santander Postdoc Fellowship at the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance (University of Warwick, 2011-12), a three-year lectureship in Early Modern English Literature at Brunel University London (2012-15), and a Solmsen Fellowship at the Institute for Research in the Humanities (University of Wisconsin - Madison, 2015-16). 

Selected Publications

Royal Genealogy in the Age of Shakespeare (The British Library/Boydell & Brewer, forthcoming)

‘Genealogy and Royal Representation: Edmund Brudenell’s Pedigree Roll for Elizabeth I (1558-60)’, Huntington Library Quarterly 81 (2018), 257-75

Mythical Ancestry in World Cultures, 1400-1800 (edited collection, Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming 2018) [introduction and essay]

'Michael Drayton: Bard and Genealogist', in Poly-Olbion and the Writing of Britain, ed. A. McRae and P. Schwyzer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, under review)

‘Nebuchadnezzar, Charlemagne and Aeneas: John Finch’s Speech for the King and Queen at Canterbury’, in Celebrations for the Wedding of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, ed. M.-C. Canova-Green and S. Wolfson (London: Routledge, 2017)

‘The Golden Fleece of the London Drapers’ Company: Politics and Iconography in Early Modern Lord Mayor’s Shows’, in The Iconography of Power: Ceremonial Entries in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe, ed. J.R. Mulryne and M. Shewring (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 245-65

‘The Impact of the Netherlandish Landscape Tradition on Poetry and Painting in Early Modern England’, Renaissance Quarterly 66 (2013), 866-903 

‘Mildmay Fane’s Masque Raguaillo D’Oceano (1640): Royalism, Puritanism and Sea Voyages’, Renaissance Studies 27 (2013), 34-50 

‘“The murmuring woods euen shuddred as with feare”: Deforestation in Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion’, The Seventeenth Century 26 (2011), 240-63 

‘Lady of the Lake or Queen of the Ocean? The Role of Female Power in Prince Henry’s Barriers and Tethys’ Festival’, in Representations of Elizabeth I in Early Modern Culture, ed. A. Petrina and L. Tosi, intr. S. Orgel (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 158-71 

‘Representations of Queen Elizabeth in the Private Poetry of Mildmay Fane, Second Earl of Westmorland (1601-1666)’, in Queen and Country, ed. A. Petrina (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 239-58