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Dr Rachel Willie

Humanities and Social Science

Faculty of Arts Professional and Social Studies

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ORCID

My research covers seventeenth-century literary history and culture. My first book, "Staging the Revolution: drama, reinvention and history, 1647-72" (shortlisted for the University English Early Career Book Prize, 2016) offers a reappraisal of drama, both in terms of live performances and performances on the paper stage. My book argues that, far from 1660 marking a watershed moment as is often asserted in the texts transmitted in the Restoration and assumed to be true by later critics, late seventeenth-century England was concerned with the continuing legacies of recent history and this is revealed in literature printed and disseminated in the period. While researching this book, I became intrigued by the number of anonymous scurrilous pamphlets ‘by the man in the moon’ and I have begun a wider study on ‘long seventeenth-century’ responses to the moon as an embodied and as a philosophical construct. With Kevin Killeen and Helen Smith, both based at the University of York, I co-edited "The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c. 1530-1700" (winner of the Roland H. Bainton Prize in Reference Works, 2016). More recently, my research has broadened to consider emotions and the senses by drawing from my interests in material cultures and the relationship between literature and the epistemologies that underpin politics, religion and natural philosophy; this is supported by considering the relationship between literature and history. I have ongoing interests in early modern drama, music, cheap print, publicness, the early modern soundscape, history and cultural history, and the history of ideas.

Before joining LJMU in 2016, I taught at Bangor University, the University of Manchester and the University of York. I have taught extensively across all periods of English literary history and interdisciplinary modules on the relationship between music and text. My teaching is fundamentally dialogic, encouraging students to explore ideas through discussion and analysis as a way to extend and stimulate critical thinking. I would be happy to receive proposals for postgraduate research on early modern literature and culture, especially on early modern drama; early modern prose; seventeenth-century political thought; early modern science and religion; performance and the paper stage; adaptation; myth and cultural memory; writing history; materialities.

Degrees

University of York, United Kingdom, PhD in English
King's College London, United Kingdom, MA in English
University of Roehampton, United Kingdom, BA (hons) in English Literature and Music

Certifications

2021, English Association, Fellow
2020, Royal Historical Society, FRHistS
2015, Higher Education Academy, United Kingdom, FHEA

Academic appointments

Reader in Early Modern Literary Studies, Liverpool John Moores University, 2019 - present
Senior Lecturer, Liverpool John Moores Unversity, 2016 - 2019

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