Rosemary Dixon, BA, MSt (Oxford) PhD (London)

 

Dr Williams's Centre AssociateR Dixon


email: rosemary.dixon@kcl.ac.uk


Rosemary Dixon's research is concerned with the literary and religious culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with a particular focus on the history of the book. Her PhD thesis on John Tillotson (1630-94) concentrated on printed sermons, which were among the most successful and popular books published during this period. This research will form the basis of her first book: a study of the commercial, theological, and cultural life of the printed sermon in Restoration and eighteenth-century England.


Rose is particularly interested in the histories of libraries, and what they can reveal about the ways that the readers of the past perceived, organised, and used their books. From June 2009 to May 2011 she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Dissenting Studies, working on the AHRC-funded project 'Dissenting Academy Libraries and their Readers, 1720-1860'. A major outcome of the project is the Virtual Library System, an innovative online reconstruction of the holdings and loan records of dissenting academy libraries. This is an essential source for the new History of the Dissenting Academies (forthcoming from CUP), to which she is also a contributor.

 

Since September 2011, Rose has been Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature at King's College London. In the 2011-12 academic year she is convening the King's MA in Early Modern Literature: Text and Transmission, taught jointly with the British Library, and teaching for various undergraduate modules. In addition to her work at King's, Rose is involved in supervising new work to develop and extend the Virtual Library System.

 

Selected publications:

  • 'Sermons in Print 1660-1700', in The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon, ed. Peter McCullough, Hugh Adlington, and Emma Rhatigan (Oxford University Press, 2011), 460-79
  • 'Sermon Publishing, Clerical Reading, and John Wilkins's Ecclesiastes, 1646- 1750', Religion in the Age of Enlightenment, 1 (2010), 225-47
  • 'The Publishing of John Tillotson's Collected Works 1695-1757', The Library, 7th series, 8:2 (June 2007), 154-81