People
The Digital Miscellanies Index is based at the Bodleian Centre for the Study of the Book, and the University of Oxford Faculty of English. Details of the team of researchers and musicians involved in the project can be found on this page.
Dr Abigail Williams
Principal Investigator
Abigail Williams is Lord White Fellow and Tutor in English at St Peter's College, Oxford, and a lecturer in the English Faculty. She is the author of Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture (OUP, hardback, 2005, paperback, 2009), and is currently completing an edition of Jonathan Swift's Journal to Stella for Cambridge University Press. She is particularly interested in the role of the excerpt within miscellanies, and the role of miscellanies as a form of reception history. Along with Dr Kate Rumbold (Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham) she is planning a symposium on the use of the textual extract in eighteenth-century culture.
Dr Jennifer Batt
Postdoctoral Project Co-ordinator
Jenny finished her D. Phil on the agricultural labourer turned court poet Stephen Duck in 2008. She has taught English literature of the 17th and 18th centuries at a range of Oxford colleges and at the University of Birmingham. She is currently turning her D. Phil into a monograph, and working on articles emerging from the Miscellanies Index on Samuel Croxall’s poem ‘The Midsummer Wish’, and the topical miscellany The Windsor Medley.
John Mctague
Research Assistant
John completed his first degree and masters at Mansfield College, Oxford, before moving to St Catherine's College, Oxford, in the second year of DPhil study. His thesis, completed in 2010, is on the representation of British politics from c. 1678-1720, focussing on the ways hoaxes and scandals like the Bickerstaff papers or Defoe's Shortest Way with the Dissenters expose and exploit the fictionality of the political settlement, and exploring the uses and misuses of partisan historiography. Together with Stephen Bernard and Claudine van Hensbergen he is a co-editor of a special issue of Eighteenth-Century Life (due out in 2010) on letters in the long eighteenth century. John likes cake, cycling, and year-round beer gardens.
Chris Salamone
Research Assistant
Chris completed his D. Phil at Mansfield College in 2010. His thesis, supervised by Katharine Duncan-Jones and Emma Smith, was entitled: ‘Authors, Apparitions, and Rhetorical Shadows: The Literary Ghosts of Elizabethan and Jacobean Literature’. The thesis examines how early modern writers and printers associated the figure of the ghost and the notion of haunting metaphorically with various facets of literary production, such as representation, textual reproduction, authorship, reading and dramatic performance. His research interests, largely focused on sixteenth and seventeenth-century literature, include; the supernatural; early modern drama; Elizabethan and Jacobean prose, particularly Nashe and Greene; the literary culture of the 1590’s; book history; literary theory; reception and literary reputation; perceptions/construction of authorial identity.
Dianne Mitchell
Research Assistant
Dianne is a graduate of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. She recently completed her M.St. in English 1550-1780 at Jesus College, Oxford, focusing on Samuel Daniel and Ben Jonson's creation of the female ideal in their verse epistles to countesses and in masques featuring these women. Her scholarly interests include ekphrasis in early modern writing, poetic manuscript miscellanies, the creation and reception of verse epistles in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, and the role of noblewomen as both recipients and creators of poems. When not working on the Digital Miscellanies Index, Dianne teaches secondary school students and sings in the choir at St. Margaret's Church in Jericho.
Dr Laurence Williams
Research Assistant
Laurence Williams graduated from Oxford with a doctorate in English in November 2010, and joined the DMI in January 2011. His dissertation focused on ideas of space and digression in eighteenth-century British travel writing about the 'East'. He is particularly interested in Orientalism in eighteenth-century culture, and in travel accounts and other writings by working-class authors, and hopes to develop these areas of research further through his work on the Index.
Michael F. Suarez, S.J.
External consultant
Michael F. Suarez, S.J. is Director of Rare Book School, Professor of English, University Professor, and Honorary Curator of Special Collections at the University of Virginia. Among his recent projects are The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Volume 5, 1695-1830 (CUP, 2009; co-edited with Michael Turner); The Oxford Companion to the Book (OUP, 2010; co-General Editor with H. R. Woudhuysen); and The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins (8 vols., OUP, 2005-13; co-General Editor with Lesley Higgins).
Adam Rounce
External consultant
Adam Rounce is Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has published extensively on poetry and literary criticism in the 'long' eighteenth century, from Dryden and Johnson to Joseph Warton, William Cowper, Charles Churchill, and Mark Akenside. He is currently co-editing one volume, and contributing an accompanying Chronology, to the Cambridge Complete Works of Jonathan Swift. He has written a book about literary failure, concerning the unsuccessful careers of writers that were known to Samuel Johnson.
James Woolley
External consultant
James Woolley is the Frank Lee and Edna M. Smith Professor of English at Lafayette College. His special interests include the verse of the long eighteenth century is among his special interests, and he is the author of Swift's Later Poems (Garland, 1988). He edited Swift and Sheridan's The Intelligencer (OUP, 1992) and is one of the editors of Swift's poems for the Cambridge Works of Jonathan Swift, in progress. He maintains a checklist, Finding English Verse, 1650-1800: First-Line Indexes and Searchable Electronic Texts.
ALVA
ALVA is a voice and fiddle duo made up of singer Vivien Ellis and fiddle-player Giles Lewin. Their work explores the links between early European vocal repertoire and surviving folksong traditions. The duo have completed a successful Early Music Network tour and performed all over Britain and in the USA. Their concerts have featured on BBC4, BBC Radio 3's The Early Music Show and Late Junction. They have released 3 CDs with Beautiful Jo Records: Love Burns in Me, The Bells of Paradise and The Dawn Songs.
Giles Lewin
Musician
Giles Lewin specialises in the traditional music of Europe and the Middle East. He has always preferred informal to formal music making, learning most of his Irish music in the pub, and with the band Afterhours. His interest in the Arab influences in medieval music led him to Cairo, where he studied Arabic violin with Ashraf al Sarki. Giles is a founder member of the medieval ensemble The Dufay Collective, traditional group The Carnival Band, and the award- winning folk band Bellowhead.
Vivien Ellis
Musician
Vivien Ellis performs early music with The Dufay Collective and international ensemble Sinfonye. She has toured throughout the UK and Europe, and has made several tours of North and South America, Canada and Australia. She has made numerous recordings as a soloist, and has featured in many radio broadcasts, TV soundtracks and theatre performances including work with the RSC. She is a community musician for The Spitalfields Festival in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, runs voice workshops and teaches at Dartington Music Summer School.
