The Institute of English Studies
History of the book, manuscript and print studies and textual scholarship research
Why I Got Into Palaeography
Our London International Palaeography Summer School (LIPSS) tutors offer specialized training in a wide variety of subjects, but they share a love of manuscripts. Here five of the team tell us about why they are passionate about palaeography and how they got into...
Learning to Read
Here is this week’s pile of books. No doubt they will last longer than a week – as Susan Elderkin noted in her blog, it is not easy to read in a pandemic. When I was completing my doctoral research around full-time work, I used to have a daydream…
Introducing the Book of Kells
Dr Carol Farr, Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies A super-star attraction of Trinity College Dublin, the Book of Kells is known to many people across the globe. Besides being a recognisable emblem of Irish culture, it is a complex object. Probably...
Puzzle Books
Clare Lees, Director of the Institute of English Studies, Professor of Medieval Literature In 2013, I worked with a group of poets associated with the Newcastle Centre for Literary Arts, commissioned to respond to the ‘return’ of the great early medieval manuscript,...
Crisis Reading and Letter-Writing in an Eighteenth-Century Smallpox Outbreak: The Case of Elizabeth Robinson Montagu
One morning in May, 1741, outside a small farmhouse in the village of Hayton in Kent, the 20 year-old Elizabeth Robinson (1720-1800) cried as her father, Matthew Robinson, refused to embrace her. He feared transferring the smallpox…
How I fell back in love with poetry in Lockdown
How prescient that Dr Shafquat Towheed and Dr Edmund King had chosen ‘Reading and Wellbeing’ as the subject of their HOBAR seminar series this season. Key workers have been performing duties which have rarely been as valued, placing themselves at risk by working in hospitals, supermarkets, collecting bins, and delivering parcels…
Books for Travel in a Time of Crisis: the Word Deployed by Ward and Solnit
Connor, 11, is a hopeful entrant to BBC Radio’s short story writers’ competition 500 Words 2020. I heard him interviewed just the other day. Reading a good book, he said, can ‘take you to another place’. That’s why he was entering the competition. Connor wanted to use his words to transform his readers’ sense of their world, to take them somewhere different…
Book History Without the Books
Amy Kaufman (MRes History of the Book) Like many IES students I had planned to spend the spring digging (very gently) through London’s rich archives and special collections rather than experiencing its arrival for a second time at my mother-in-law’s house in Muskoka,...
Being a CULTIVATE MSS PhD student
Our early experience as CULTIVATE MSS PhD students within the Institute of English Studies is unusual in a twofold way: we are part of a wider project, and we face teleworking due to the COVID-19 crisis in the very first months of our research. Here’s a little insight into this peculiar status of ours.
Bibliotherapy Lessons from Lockdown
When lockdown began, many of us imagined reading those tomes that we’d been putting off for decades, such as Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, or all twelve volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell…