Skip to main content
Overview

Dr Elizabeth Swann

Assistant Professor


Affiliations
Affiliation
Assistant Professor in the Department of English Studies
Department Rep (English Studies) in the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Biography

Academic Bio

I joined Durham as Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies in September 2018, following stints as Research Associate on the ERC-funded project Crossroads of Knowledge: The Place of Literature in Early Modern England at the University of Cambridge (2014-2018), and Haslam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (2013-2014). Before that, I completed my PhD in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York.

Current Research Activities

My research interests are diverse, but they focus on the relationships between literature, natural philosophy (aka early 'science'), and theology in England, circa 1500-1700. I am particularly interested in the ways that literary texts represent various forms of knowing and knowledge as an embodied, passionate, and historically situated set of practices and experiences. 

My first monograph, Taste and Knowledge in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2020), investigated the relation between the physical sense of taste, and taste as a metaphorical term used to denote various forms of knowledge and judgement (including, but not only, aesthetic taste). In the early modern period, I argued, taste in both these 'senses' played a key role in the cultivation of humanist erudition, in the so-called ‘scientific revolution,’ in theological debates about how best to access divine truth, and in the experience and articulation of intersubjective knowledge and sexual desire. 

My second monograph, Science as Child's Play in Seventeenth Century England: Innocence, Experience, Experiment is forthcoming with Palgrave Pivot in January 2025. This short book reveals the central importance of children to the early development of experiment science, both as rhetorical exemplars and as active participants. Focusing on the work of the early Royal Society, I show - amongst other things - how ideas about childish innocence, sensory acuity, and playfulness led to their valorization as archetypal proto-empiricists and objective observors, in ways which subsequently shaped broader cultural ideas about childhood and education. 

I am currently working on two more monograph projects. The first, Knowledge and Power: A Critical History, explores the origins of the ‘knowledge is power’ aphorism in early modern England, as well as the afterlife of the aphorism in Enlightenment philosophy and politics, in twentieth-century critical theory, and in modern popular, political, and educational cultures. I show how the assertion that 'knowledge is power' has, historically, been deployed both in a spirit of empancipatory optimism, and of cynical suspicion. In either case, I argue, the principle is frequently inadequate, inaccurate, and even destructive, and has contributed (amongst other things) to a growing climate of anti-intellectualism in the twenty-first century. 

The second monograph project, provisionally titled On Overreading: Shadows in the Water, starts with a question: what distinguishes an insightful close reading of a text from an implausible overreading? Offering a longue dureé investigation of ideas about and practices of over-intepretation, via figures including Aristotle, Macrobius, Montaigne, Freud, and Derrida, I scrutinize overreading's entwinement with superfluity and error, whilst ultimately making a case for its vitality as an exegetical strategy with much to contribute to learning and teaching in the twenty-first century academy. 

I am also interested in the field of Critical University Studies, particularly the ways in which the kinds of knowledge produced in universities in the twenty-first century is shaped by the historical, cultural, socio-economic, and personal contexts of research and teaching. Some thoughts about this topic are available as a blogpost here

I welcome enquiries from postgraduate students with interests in intersections between literature, theology, and natural philosophy, and the senses and embodiment, in Renaissance England.

Other Research Activities

I have co-edited two collections. The Poesy of Scientia in Early Modern England, with Subha Mukherji (Palgrave, 2024) explores interconnections between the modes of knowing that we now associate with the rubrics ‘literature’ and ‘science’ at a formative point in their early development. Sensing the Sacred in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, with Emilie Murphy and Robin Macdonald (Routledge, 2018), traces transformations in attitudes toward, ideas about, and experiences of religion and the senses in Europe between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries.

I am also co-curator of an online exhibition hosted by the Fitzwilliam Museum, available here. This exhibition, titled Renaissance Spaces of Knowing: Privacy and Performance, explores the locations in which knowledge was generated, moving from public spaces including the marketplace, the law-courts, the theatre, the church, and the schoolroom, to private and quasi-private spaces including the garden, the study, and the bedroom. 

 

Publications

Authored book

Book review

Chapter in book

Conference Paper

Edited book

Other (Digital/Visual Media)

Presentation

Supervision students