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Fellowships and opportunities

We offer various opportunities to both UK and international researchers keen to develop their work in an area which overlaps with the group's studies.

Past Opportunities

  • CHASE/London Renaissance Seminar: Free research assistance 2021–22 

    For nine months from September 2021, the London Renaissance Seminar can offer free research assistance undertaken by two research assistants to work on Renaissance and early modern projects in London and in nearby archives and libraries. The work will be undertaken by two postgraduate Research Assistants generously supported by the CHASE partnership graduate consortium. The graduates are specialists in English literature 1550-1720 but are able to extend to historical briefs.

    Researchers will undertake work for between three and twelve hours. Additional work will be negotiated. The aim is to enable scholars to pursue tasks at the British Library, other London archives, including London Metropolitan Archives, and at libraries and archives within reasonable distance, for example, Bodleian, Kent. The Research Assistants have experience working with manuscripts and are able to undertake research and checking in manuscripts or in printed books. There is no restriction in terms of who can apply for the service and we are aware that the difficulty of library access affects scholars at all levels of the profession, from doctoral students to emeriti. We welcome commissions from all scholars. 

    You do not need to establish that the pandemic has affected your research in order to apply. This scheme is a continuation of one prompted by the events of the pandemic which affected both travel and access to archives and is now continuing because we think that for some kinds of jobs this service may be useful in any case. In sum, please do send your projects and we hope that we can help. And remember that researchers can now extend their reach beyond London to archives that are relatively local to the capital.

    When applying for research assistance, we ask that you bear in mind that things can still take a little longer; the travelling time involved; and that only limited numbers of books or manuscripts can be ordered for any given day at, for example, the British Library. Thus, unfortunately, for example, an exploratory survey of books is not at present possible. We have found that many other tasks are possible, however, so do ask. Possible subjects would include: the checking of manuscript quotations, the researching of whether or not specific texts bear annotations, transcription, the checking of State Papers online. Please frame the task as clearly as possible, consider and specify how long it is likely to take someone less familiar with the material, and whether it would require any particular skills. 

    If you think that this research assistance might benefit your project please contact the convenor of the London Renaissance Seminar, . 

Current Fellow

  • Anna Welch (Curatorial Fellow Spring 2020): Dr Anna Welch is a book historian specialising in medieval material, from manuscript to early print. Her main research interest has always been in Franciscan book production, but she is increasingly interested in early print culture across the board, both text and image. She has a PhD in medieval manuscript studies, and Master degrees in both Curatorial Studies and Librarianship. At the moment, she holds the Harold Wright and the Sarah & William Holmes scholarships at the British Museum, studying in the Prints & Drawings collection. While there, she is narrowing down the vastness of the collection by concentrating on Italian and German prints and drawings of the 15th and 16th centuries, particularly regarding the iconography of St Francis of Assisi receiving the stigmata. She is also exploring collection history, particularly the separation of single-sheet and codex prints between the Museum and the Library, which is a history paralleled in the Library and Gallery in Melbourne.

Past visiting Fellows

  • Patricia Phillippy (Autumn/Spring 2019-20): Patricia Phillippy is London Renaissance Seminar Fellow for the academic year 2019-20. Her research expertise is in early modern British literature and culture, with particular interests in gender and women's writing, manuscript studies, and material culture. Recent publications include Shaping Remembrance from Shakespeare to Milton (Cambridge 2018) and A History of Early Modern Women’s Writing (Cambridge 2018). Her monograph in progress is entitled, Family Plots: Women, Climate and Matter in the Early Modern World.
  • Dr Micheline White (January - June 2020): Professor Micheline White (Carleton University, Canada) holds an LRS fellowship January 2020-June 2020. She is the holder of an SSHRC Insight Development Grant:  “Elite Tudor Women’s Prayer Books as Material, Devotional, and Socio-Political Artefacts.” While she is here Professor White will give a lecture on the topic of prayer books and gifts. She is the co-editor (with Leah Knight and Elizabeth Sauer) of Early Modern Women’s Bookscapes: Reading, Ownership, Circulation (2018); the editor of English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500–1625(2011); and the editor of Secondary Work on Early Modern Women Writers: Isabella Whitney, Aemilia Lanyer, and Anne Lock (2009). She has published on women and religion in the Times Literary Supplement, Renaissance Studies, ELR, Modern Philology, and the Sixteenth-Century Journal.
  • Zenón Luis Martínez (Summer 2018): Zenón Luis Martínez was an LRS Early Career Fellow in July and August 2018. He is a scholar of English Renaissance Literature at the University of Huelva (Spain).
  • Professor Ros Smith (Spring/Summer 2016): Professor Ros Smith (Associate Professor of English at the University of Newcastle, Australia) specialises in early modern women's writing, with an interest in gender and genre, politics and history and is a coordinator of the Early Modern Women Research Network. Her publications include Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560-1621: The Politics of Absence, and a collection on Material Cultures of Early Modern Women's Writing, both with Palgrave Macmillan, as well as articles and chapters on Renaissance poetry. She also co-directs the Centre of 21st Century Humanities at the University of Newcastle, with interests in cross-disciplinary research, the digital humanities and external engagement. She is currently working on two monographs - one on early modern women's marginalia and another on the poetry of Mary Queen of Scots, as well as a book chapter on early modern women and religion. She also has research interests in early modern women, true crime and complaint.
  • Professor Stephen Guy-Bray (Autumn 2015): Professor Stephen Guy-Bray was an LRS Visiting Fellow for autumn 2015, when he discussed poetry, writing and the Renaissance. Stephen Guy-Bray is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He specialises in Renaissance poetry. He is the author of three monographs (most recently Against Reproduction: Where Renaissance Texts Come From) and the co-editor of two essay collections (most recently The Age of Thomas Nashe: Texts, Bodies and Trespasses of Authorship in Early Modern England) as well as numerous articles and chapters, chiefly on Renaissance literature. He is currently working on a monograph on poetic paraphrase, an edition of George Peele's The Old Wives Tale, and essays on mid-17th century English poetry and Renaissance woman and textual production.

Past early career fellows

  • Orlando Reade (Early Career Fellow for 2020-21): Orlando Reade is a researcher of early modern English poetry. His doctoral dissertation (Princeton, 2020), "Being a Lover of the World": Lyric Poetry and Political Disaffection after the English Civil War', discusses the work of four poets – Henry Vaughan, Katherine Philips, John Milton and Thomas Traherne - writing during the 1650s and 1660s. It describes how they developed a positive, affirmative poetics in response to experiences of political turbulence and personal crisis. He is also interested in the history of poetic clichés, and has recently written essays on poets' preoccupation with the dusk and the sovereignty of the rose as a symbol of love. During his LRS fellowship he will develop new research on the connections between poetry and colonialism in the Caribbean, and also on the long history of Romanticism, from the seventeenth century to the present.
  • Dr Jonathan Gallagher: Jonathan Gallagher is an LRS Early Career Fellow for 2020-21. He completed his PhD in 2018 at the University of Edinburgh and is now working on a book entitled ‘Ungodded England: Religious Poetry and the Early Modern State’. It includes chapters on the religious poetry of John Donne, George Herbert, John Milton and John Dryden. Jonathan’s work has been published in Modern Philology (Nov. 2017), and he has another article forthcoming with Studies in Philology (Fall 2020).
  • Dr Gabriella Edelstein (Autumn/Winter 2019): Dr Gabriella Edelstein is the LRS Early Career Fellow for autumn-winter 2019. She is a Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Newcastle, Australia and the 2019 S. Ernest Sprott Fellow. She completed her PhD in 2018 at the University of Sydney and is now working on a monograph titled Censorship, Collaboration, and the Construction of Authorship in Early Modern Theatre. Her project considers the ways in which censorship operated within the collaborative mechanisms of the theatrical industry. In particular, that playwrights used a rhetoric of collaboration to defend themselves against censorship, as well as how the Master of the Revels took on a collaborative (if not authorial) role in the writing of plays. She has work upcoming in ELR on Ben Jonson and two chapters forthcoming on John Fletcher.
  • Rebecca Tomlin (Autumn/Spring 2018-19): Rebecca Tomlin completed her PhD in 2016 and is an Associate Scholar of the project Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern England based at CRASSH and the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. She is currently working on a monograph provisionally entitled Neighbourhood, Charity, and Identity in Late- Sixteenth Century Drama, which examines ideas of neighbourhood in early modern London. Interests include early modern London, charity, begging, cultural geography, and theatre. She also has a long-standing interest in early double-entry book-keeping books as pedagogical texts which attempted to present an essentially practical applied technique as an art. When she is not researching and writing, she works at the Society of Antiquaries of London.
  • Sam Fullerton (Spring/Summer 2018): Sam Fullerton was an LRS Early Career Fellow for spring and summer 2018. He is a PhD candidate in early modern British history at the University of California, Riverside. His dissertation, entitled Sex and the English Revolution, explores the impact of newly printed discourses of sex and the body on the public life and political culture of the English Civil Wars and Interregnum.