Georgina Wilson

@GeorginaEMW

Supervisors: Professor Adam Smyth and Dr Olivia Smith

Research Interests: Early modern prose and poetry, material texts, ideas of space and matter. 

Doctoral Research: My research re-assesses the relationship between early modern literature and science with a critical attention to the materiality of texts. Early modern texts are boldly and self-consciously material things: my question is how this materiality plays out in the relationship between ‘science’ and ‘literature’ at a historical moment when cosmological knowledge is under scrutiny. Globes, the superlunary sphere, microscopy, and matter are material and metaphysical concepts constructed in the texts of late fifteenth- to mid-sixteenth-century authors. By considering the texts of John Blagrave, John Donne, Hester Pulter, Margaret Cavendish and John Milton as material objects consisting of printed layers, lively surfaces, traces and spaces, borders and boundaries, I ask: how are early modern notions of cosmological space conceived and contested in the early modern book?