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Mary Morrissey

Mary Morrissey portrait

Postgraduate supervision

I have supervised PhD thesis a range of topics in early modern literature and culture, as well as being part of the supervisory team for PhDs on Medieval literature and women’s writing. I welcome postgraduates interested in undertaking research in these areas. 

Teaching

Within the department I teach across a range of literary periods, looking at non-realist and fantasy literature from the Middle Ages to the present, and political non-fiction.

I convene:

  • EN2WPS (Writing in the Public Sphere). This module looks at political non-fiction on five historical debates on topics that continue to shape our politics (race, class, women’s rights, workers’ rights and the environment).
  • EN3LV (Lyric Voices 1340-1660). This module explores short poems across the Medieval and Renaissance period with a particular emphasis on the adaptability of literary conventions and the links between poetry and song.

I co-convene:

  • EN2MLR (Myth, Legend and Romance: Medieval storytelling). This module explores early and later medieval texts, from Beowulf  to The Canterbury Tales through an exploration of different models of storytelling, from ancient legend to courtly Romance.
  • EN3RF (From Romance to Fantasy). This module looks at the history of non-realist fiction in English, from the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, through the Romances of Shakespeare, the Gothic stories of eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings to twenty-first century Fantasy.
  • ENMWRW (Women’s Writing, Women’s Rights). This interdisciplinary module (taught with colleagues from the History department) considers women’s writing on women’s rights, from Mary Wollstonecraft to the 20th century campaign for women’s suffrage. 

Research projects

Much of my published work considers the literature of the Reformation, particularly preaching and biblical interpretation. . I am particularly interested in Paul's Cross, the most important public pulpit in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England. The role of preaching in the civic culture of early modern London is a major concern of my research. I am particularly interested in John Donne, as a preacher as well as a poet and a Londoner.  I retain an interested in early modern women writers, with a particular focus on women writers' use of theological arguments.

Early Modern Research Centre

I have collaborated on a three-year project on 'Paul Cross and the Culture of Persuasion: Tudor Origins of the Early Modern Public Sphere', PI Professor Torrance Kirby, Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University, Montreal. This project was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

I was a member of the Advisory Board, 'Virtual Paul's Cross' Project, funded by the NEH, PI: Professor John Wall, NC State University.

I am a member of the Advisory Board on the GEMMS project (Gateway to Early Modern Manuscript Sermons), funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Academic qualifications

  • Member of the Society for Renaissance Studies. 
  • Fellow of the Royal Historical Society 

Selected publications

  • ‘’, Review of English Studies, 74, pp. 64-77,
  • ‘’, in The English Bible in the Early Modern World, eds. and  (Brill, 2018), pp. 84–103&²Ô²ú²õ±è;
  • ‘’, Huntington Library Quarterly 80 (2), (2017) 293-307
  • Politics and the Paul's Cross Sermons, 1558-1642 (Oxford University Press, 2011), ISBN: 0199571767.
  • The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 53 (4), (2002), pp. 686-706,

Public engagements

  •  (YouTube)
  •  (YouTube)

Publications

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