Johanna Harris, BA Hons (Sydney), MSt, DPhil (Oxford)

Lecturer in Renaissance Literature, University of Exeter, and Visiting Research Fellow, Dr Williams’s Centre

Johanna Harris completed a DPhil in 2008 at Somerville College, Oxford, on the letters of the early Stuart puritan, Lady Brilliana Harley, and the epistolary genre in early Stuart England. This research is currently under development as a monograph, Puritan Epistolary Community in Early Modern England: The Letters of the Harley Network (contracted to Palgrave Macmillan), which will demonstrate the literary and cultural significance of letter writing to studies of ‘community’ in early modern England. She is currently editing the manuscript writings of Harley (other than the letters) for Ashgate’s series The Early Modern Englishwoman: Contemporary Editions. Alongside ongoing interests in Harley, English puritanism, epistolary culture, and the religious-political character of England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, her current research also includes the manuscript and print variants of Andrew Marvell’s poetry, and the epistolary styles and techniques of Marvell’s letters. As a co-general editor with Dr Alison Searle, she is developing a project to edit the complete correspondence of Richard Baxter, an enormous and invaluable archive largely held in Dr Williams’s Library.

Recent and forthcoming publications include:

‘Lady Brilliana Harley’s Letters and Puritan Intellectual Culture’, Literature Compass (2011)
‘Lady Brilliana Harley’s Letters and the Literature of Advice’, New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, V, ed. M. Denbo (Renaissance English Text Society, 2011)
Biographical chapters on Harley, Anne Bradstreet and Mary Love in the forthcoming Blackwell Encyclopaedia of English Renaissance Literature, ed. G. Sullivan, A. Stewart, N. McDowell, et al. (Blackwell, 2011)
The Intellectual Culture of Puritan Women, 1558-1680, edited with Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
‘Lucy Robartes’ “A meditation uppon the Lords day”: A Puritan Palimpsest and English Sabbatarianism’, The Seventeenth Century, 23:1 (2008)

She is also an invited Advisory Board Member on the AHRC-funded project ‘The Letters of Elizabeth Talbot (known as ‘Bess of Hardwick’, c.1527-1608)’ (2008-11), and regularly reviews for TLS and ABES.