James Knowles

James Knowles specialises in early modern literature and culture (1500-1700) and has published widely on early modern drama especially Jonson, Marlowe, Marston, Middleton, and Shakespeare. He is an internationally recognised expert on the court masque and civic pageantry and has written on literary and cultural geographies, orientalism, patronage and collecting, manliness and sexuality, verse libel and manuscript culture. He also retains a wider interest in gender, sexualities, and book culture including modern and contemporary gay writing and queer theory.

Research Overview

Research Students:

He has supervised three AHRC funded PhDs to completion including Dr Jerome De Groot (now senior lecturer, University of Manchester: see http://www.manchester.ac.uk/research/jerome.degroot ), and Dr Jessica Dyson (University of Portsmouth: see http://www.port.ac.uk/departments/academic/sshls/staff/title,141119,en.html).

For current PhD students, see ‘Teaching Interests’.

Postdoctoral Fellows:

James Knowles is research director for three EU funded Marie Curie projects:

Architecture and European court festivals (http://cordis.europa.eu/search/index.cfm?fuseaction=acro.document&AC_LANG=EN&AC_RCN=10800979&pid=0&q=DC2AADBF586DA24ACD2A6370BBBAFC3E&type=sim )

Anglo-Ottoman relations and early orientalism (http://cordis.europa.eu/search/index.cfm?fuseaction=proj.document&PJ_LANG=EN&PJ_RCN=11515360&pid=0&q=B0546B821C9FD64FEC4BB7006FC3BBDD&type=sim )

Shakespeare and the 1590s style (http://cordis.europa.eu/search/index.cfm?fuseaction=proj.document&PJ_LANG=EN&PJ_RCN=11774584&pid=3&q=28ACED9661BE4CA8613373A94926CA6E&type=sim ).

Other:

James Knowles has held fellowships at the Huntington Library and was a Leverhulme Trust research fellow (1995-6). He sits on the advisory board of ‘Ages and stages: the place of theatre in representations and recollections of ageings’ (http://newdynamics.group.shef.ac.uk/projects/38).

Teaching Activity

Undergraduate
EN 1000: Early Modern Writers: Shakespeare and his Contemporaries
EN 2002: Shakespeare and Performance
EN3606: Erotic Bodies: Gender, Sexuality, and Pornography in Renaissance Writing

Postgraduate (taught)
EN5538: Early Modern Identities: Selfhoods, Sexualities, and the Social Stage

Current PhD Supervisions
The Renaissance Re- Imagination (see http://ucc-ie.academia.edu/AvrilBuchanan)
Thomas Middleton and Ocular Culture (Coirle Mooney, IRCHSS funded)
Milton and Chivalric Romance (Colin Lahive, IRCHSS funded)
Spenserian Poetry and in the 1630s and 1640s (Cian O’Mahoney, IRCHSS funded)
Anglo-Dutch Literary Relations and Representations (Siobhan Higgins, IRCHSS funded)

I welcome PhD applications in any area of early moderns studies, and also sexualities and writing (1800 to modern), queer theory, and new histories of the book.