Periodic Reporting for period 2 - Womenswriting (Women’s Plague Writing in Early Modern England)
Reporting period: 2019-09-01 to 2020-08-31
My project also features a significant trans-Atlantic dimension, and I have spearheaded an edited volume entitled Medicine and Religion in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1600-1815, which has been submitted to Penn State University Press. The volume features eminent scholars in the fields of trans-Atlantic studies, early modern history and literature, and plague writing. The volume includes valuable contributions that situate early modern plague outbreaks within the Atlantic world.
The final period of the Fellowship also saw opportunities to further my expertise in early modern paleography. In August 2022, I co-taught a course with Claire McNulty for the Folger Institute through the Folger Shakespeare Library and Queen’s University Belfast. The course addressed pedagogical approaches to paleography. Prior to this, in January 2020, I co-taught a course with Claire McNulty at Queen’s University Belfast, entitled “Introduction to English Paleography.” In both courses, I was able to deliver research-led teaching that drew directly upon my Fellowship research on women’s plague writing.
The publications connected with the project have progressed in the final period of the Fellowship. I was invited to submit a chapter to the volume Circuits of Disease and Caregiving in Shakespeare's Changing World in August 2021, which will be published by Arden. I submitted the chapter “‘we did not all dye thereof’: Chemical Medicine and the Shut House in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610) and Mary Trye’s Medicatrix (1675)” in March 2023, and revisions are requested for August 2023. I submitted the completed edited volume Medicine and Religion in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1600-1815 to Penn State University Press in 2021. The volume will be revised and resubmitted in July 2023. The volume includes my introduction, as well as my chapter “Printing England’s Plague Past in New England.” The Fellowship monograph is nearly completed and will be submitted to Oxford University Press in 2023.
I have been awarded a Folger Short Term Fellowship in spring 2024 to investigate the intersection of plague and smallpox in a trans-Atlantic context. This upcoming project draws directly upon skills I refined and acquired while completing the Fellowship.