GEMMS Research Team | GEMMS: GATEWAY TO EARLY MODERN MANUSCRIPTS

Principal Investigators

Dr. Anne James is an Adjunct Professor in English at the University of Regina. She researches in the areas of early modern sermons, particularly on political occasions, and the work of John Donne. She is the author of Poets, Players, and Preachers: Remembering the Gunpowder Plot in Seventeenth-Century England (University of Toronto Press, 2016) and a contributing editor to the Oxford edition of the prose letters of John Donne.

Dr. Brent Nelson is a Professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan. Most of his research is at the intersection of the digital humanities and early modern literature and culture. He is Director of the John Donne Society’s Digital Prose Project and principal investigator on a project on early modern cabinets of curiosities.

Dr. Jeanne Shami is a Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Regina. She has had an interest in John Donne, in particular, and early modern sermons more generally for over 35 years. This work with GEMMS brings together her love of archival research and sermon scholarship. She has an article on "The Sermon" forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern English Literature and Religion. She also is a Contributing Editor to the OUP edition of the prose letters of John Donne, and Executive Editor of the Verse Letters volume of The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne (Indiana University Press).

Project Collaborators

D r. Jon Bath is an Assistant Professor of Art and Art History, and the Director of the Humanities and Fine Arts Digital Research Centre at the University of Saskatchewan. He is the co-lead of the Modeling and Prototyping Team of Implementing New Knowledge Environments (inke.ca), and co-authored chapters for the recently released Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book and Doing Digital Humanities (Routledge).

Project Manager

Dr. Jennifer Farooq is a Research Associate at the University of Regina. Her primary interests include preaching, the publishing and reception of sermons, and religious culture in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain. She is the author of Preaching in Eighteenth-Century London (Boydell, 2013) and has published articles on sermons and religious culture in England, including “Dissenters and Charity Sermons, ca. 1700-1750,” in Protestant Dissent and Philanthropy, c. 1660-c. 1920 (Boydell, 2019) and the forthcoming “‘The crown can never have too many liveings’: Queen Anne’s Patronage of the Clergy, 1702–1714,” Later Stuart Queens, 1660-1735 (Palgrave Macmillan).

Research Assistants

Nicole Maceira Cumming is a PhD candidate at the University of Strathclyde and the University of Glasgow, whose AHRC-funded research examines the role of animals within the Scottish royal court, and within the post-Reformation Kirk, during the reign of James VI, c.1579-1603. She is a committee member of the Northern Early Modern Network and a member of the British Animal Studies Network.

Abigail Hill is a PhD student in History at Boston College. Her main research interests are supernatural belief and witchcraft, specifically the ways in which print circulation affected how communities and those shaping printed narratives utilized broader debates about supernatural or magical occurrences in understanding the early modern world.

Contributing Researchers

Dr. Catherine Evans is a Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of Manchester. She works on religious literature from the mid sixteenth to late seventeenth centuries, with particular specialisms in devotional poetry, sermon culture, and book history. She has published on topics including the psalm translations of Mary Sidney Herbert and Anne Lock, George Herbert’s reception history, and the marketing of early modern sermons. Her current Leverhulme funded project is entitled, “Reflecting Devotion: Lustrous Materials in England, Scotland and Ireland 1603-1700.” This project looks at how reflective materials, specifically pearls and glass, played a part in seventeenth-century protestant devotion. She has taught at the Universities of Edinburgh, York, and Sheffield, where she completed her PhD in 2019 with funding from WRoCAH.

Dr. Adam Richter is a historian whose research focuses on science and religion in early modern Europe. He is currently researching the impact of anti-Catholic prejudice on early modern English science. Adam has taught courses on the history of science and technology at the University of Toronto, Dalhousie University, and the University of King's College. Adam has been a member of the GEMMS team since 2016.

Dr. Lucy Underwood is currently an honorary research fellow at Warwick University. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge. Her first book was Childhood, youth and religious dissent in post-Reformation England (2014). She is the editor of volume 3 of the Bloomsbury Cultural History of Youth (2023), and has also published on, inter alia, English preachers at the papal court.

Dr. Hannah Kirby Wood completed her PhD is in Medieval History at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto. Her dissertation, entitled "Intersections of Voluntary and Involuntary Poverty in Late Medieval England," explores the discursive and tangible interactions between the English mendicant orders and the lay poor. Her current research continues to explore the effects of religious discourse on notions of deservedness and charity. She is currently a term faculty member in Medieval History at St Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan.

Dr. Hannah Yip is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Manchester. Her current project is “The Clergy and Artistic Recreation in Early Modern England.” She is also co-editing, with Thomas Clifton, a collection of essays entitled Writing Early Modern Loneliness (forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan). She is the author of several articles on early modern religion and sermons in England, including “The Familial Afterlives of Parochial Sermons in Early Modern England,” Reformation 27:2 (2022).

Past Researchers

Dr. Lucy Walton (Busfield), University of Oxford, Research Assistant 2015-17.

Dr. Kyle Dase, University of Saskatchewan, Research Assistant 2020-21.

Dr. Benjamin Durham, University of Toronto, Iter Fellow 2015-16.

Mary Gebhardt, University of Regina, Research Assistant 2021-22.

Dr. Robert Imes, University of Saskatchewan, Research Assistant 2015-19.

Dr. Helen Kemp, University of Essex, Research Consultant, 2018.

Dr. David Robinson University of Toronton, Iter Fellow 2016-20 and Contributing Researcher 2020-22.

Brandon Taylor, University of Toronto, Iter Fellow 2018-19.

Advisory Board

Professor Kenneth Fincham is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Kent. He has published widely on the religious history of early modern England, including Prelate to Pastor: the episcopate of James I (1990) and, with Nicholas Tyacke, Altars Restored. The Changing Face of English Religious Worship 1547-c.1700 (2007). He is the Director of the Clergy of the Church of England Database Project (CCEd), and from 2016-2020 was Vice-President (Education) of the Royal Historical Society.

Dr. Arnold Hunt is a Research Associate Professor in History at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN. He specializes in early modern British religious and cultural history and has a particular interest in manuscript and print culture. He is the author of The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences 1590-1640 (Cambridge University Press, 2010), which won the Royal Historical Society Whitfield Book Prize. He is currently editing Vol. IX, Parochial Sermons, of the Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne (Oxford University Press).

Dr. Mary Morrissey is Associate Professor in English Literature at the University of Reading, UK. She specializes in Reformation literature, especially from London, and has a particular interest in the Paul’s Cross pulpit. She is the author of Politics and the Paul’s Cross Sermons, 1558-1642 (Oxford, 2011).

Dr. Richard Snoddy is an Associate Research Fellow and Visiting Lecturer at London School of Theology. He gained his PhD in Historical Theology at LST in 2011 for research on James Ussher and this has since been published as The Soteriology of James Ussher: The Act and Object of Saving Faith (OUP, 2014). He co-edited Learning from the Past: Essays on Reception, Catholicity and Dialogue in Honour of Anthony N. S. Lane (Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015). His research interests include the preaching of the Westminster divines and the interpretation of Lamentations in early modern Britain.

Dr. Sebastiaan Verweij is a Senior lecturer in English at the University of Bristol, UK. He specializes in the early modern literature and book history of England and Scotland and has special interests in manuscript and print histories, the work of John Donne, and the Digital Humanities. He is the author of The Literary Culture of Early Modern Scotland: Manuscript Production and Transmission, 1560-1625 (Oxford, 2016). He is currently working, with Professor Peter McCullough, on the Textual Companion volume in The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne (forthcoming c. 2024).