Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Catherine works on early modern English literature, specialising in materialism, eco-criticism, book history, and women’s writing. During her time with CultPhil she has been working on Hester Pulter’s poetry, specifically her engagement with animal parents and botany, and Mary Rich’s occasional meditations. She is interested in the relationship between philosophy and personal devotion in the period and how radical, marginal figures such as Ann Bathurst might be written into a broader history of women’s intellectual engagement. She has forthcoming work on motherhood and philosophy.
She previously held a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship at the University of Manchester for a project entitled Reflecting Devotion (2021-2024) which examined the place that glass and pearls, globally traded luxury commodities, held in religious and scientific writing in the seventeenth century. She has published on topics including women’s psalm translations, early modern almanacs, book trade trends, and George Herbert’s bad poetry. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Edinburgh Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, the Huntington Library, the John Rylands Research, and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. She received her PhD from the University of Sheffield in 2019 (AHRC funded) and is working on her first monograph, provisionally entitled The Time of the Book: Materiality and Early Modern Religious Literature.
