Dr Alison Searle BA Honours (Sydney), PhD (Sydney), FHEA

Visiting Research Fellow, Dr Williams’s Centre for Dissenting Studies

Alison Searle is a Research Associate on the AHRC-funded Complete Works of James Shirley (forthcoming with Oxford University Press, 2011-2015) at Anglia Ruskin University. She is also a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Baptist History and Heritage, Regent's Park College, University of Oxford. Her monograph entitled The Eyes of Your Heart: Literary and Theological Trajectories of Imagining Biblically was published in 2008. She is currently preparing an edition of The Sisters (1642) by James Shirley for Oxford University Press. She is also working, with Dr Johanna Harris (Exeter), on a complete edition of Richard Baxter’s correspondence. In 2006 she was a Leverhulme Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Dissenting Studies. Her primary research interests are Renaissance drama and nonconformist and dissenting cultures in the seventeenth century.

Her recent and forthcoming publications include:

‘Margaret Charlton and Anne Wentworth: Preacher's Wife and Prophetess in Post-Restoration Dissent’, in Religion and Women in Britain, c. 1660-1760, ed. Sarah Apetrei and Hannah Smith (Aldershot: Ashgate, forthcoming)
'Writing Authority in the Interregnum: The Pastoral Letters of Richard Baxter,’ in Debating the Faith: Religion and Letter-Writing in Great Britain, 1550-1800, ed. Anne Dunan-Page and Clotilde Prunier (Springer: International Archives of the History of Ideas, forthcoming 2011)
‘Ben Jonson and Religion,’ in A Handbook of Jonson Studies, ed. Eugene Giddens (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2011)
‘Conversion in James Shirley's St Patrick for Ireland' in The Turn of the Soul: Representations of Religious Conversion in Early Modern Art and Literature (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming 2011)
' “Though I am a stranger to you by face, yet in neere bonds by faith’: A Transatlantic Puritan Republic of Letters,’ Early American Literature 43.2 (2008)
‘ “My Souls Anatomiste’: Richard Baxter, Katherine Gell and Letters of the Heart’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 12.2 (2006)
‘The Biblical and Imaginative ‘Interiority’ of Samuel Rutherford,’ Dalhousie Review, 85.2 (2005)
‘Theology, Genre and Romance in Richard Baxter and Harriet Beecher Stowe,’ Religion and Literature 37.1 (2005)