Research
I am currently a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at CRASSH. My project investigates hate speech directed at religious migrants in sixteenth-century England. Religious violence prompted thousands of European Protestants to flee to England in the sixteenth century. By the 1590s, English reactions became increasingly polarised, with anti-alien riots erupting in London. I explore the heated public discourse surrounding risks and responsibilities, and the multiple modes in which England expressed both distrust and aggression toward religious migrants (such as sermons, plays, pamphlets, and parliamentary speeches). I also consider attempts to advocate for migrants’ rights, arguing for the extensive role that hate speech and advocacy played in shaping events and public opinions.
About
Prior to this role, I was a member of the European Research Council project, The Bible and Classical Antiquity in the Nineteenth Centurybased here at CRASSH. My work within this project focused on the history of the English Bible. The nineteenth century saw the translation of the first major English version since the King James Bible of 1611, as well as new discoveries of early biblical manuscripts and developments in linguistic and textual studies. Alongside such developments came nostalgia about traditional English biblical versions; both Protestant and Catholic translators emphasised continuity with early modern precursors in an attempt to balance new scholarship with tradition. My research explored nineteenth-century England’s multiple attempts to unite new understanding of the Bible with familiar early modern English versions.
Publications
Monographs in preparation
The Dark Bible: Scriptural Text and Interpretation in Early Modern England, 1526-1640
The Nostalgic Bible: The Bible in English in the Nineteenth Century
Articles and Book Chapters
‘The Borderland of the Bible: M.R. James and the New Testament Apocrypha’, The Bible and Classical Antiquity in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Simon Goldhill and Ruth Jackson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2019).
‘The Revisions of 1611 and 1881: The History of the English Bible in the Revised Version’, Using Early Modern Scholarship in Nineteenth-century Britain: The Persistence of the Past, edited by Scott Mandelbrote and Michael Ledger-Lomas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2018).
‘Audience and Error: Translation, Philology, and Rhetoric in the Preaching of Lancelot Andrewes’, in Labourers in the Vineyard of the Lord: Scholarship and the Making of the King James Version of the Bible, edited by Mordechai Feingold (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 372–397.
‘Sermons’, in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and the Arts, 2 vols., edited by Timothy Beal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 2: 347–357.
‘Donne, John’, in Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and the Arts, 2 vols., edited by Timothy Beal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1: 267–271.
‘With a Cloven Tongue: Donne’s Lamentations of Jeremy’, John Donne Journal 34 (2015): 193-212.
‘”This Verse Marks That”: George Herbert’s The Templeand Scripture in Context’, inThe Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c. 1530-1700,edited by Kevin Killeen, Helen Smith, and Rachel Judith Willie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 518–532
‘The Very, Very Words: Scriptural Misquotation in Lancelot Andrewes’s and John Donne’s Job Sermons’, Studies in Philology 111.3 (2014 Summer): 442–469.
