GEMMS Research Team

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. He is author of Holy Ambition: Rhetoric, Courtship, and Devotion in the Sermons of John Donne (MRTS, 2005). 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 40 years. This work with GEMMS brings together her love of archival research, sermon scholarship, and scholarly collaboration. Her article on "The Sermon" appeared The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern English Literature and Religion (OUP, 2017) and she was General Editor of Commentary for the Verse Letters volume of The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne (Indiana UP, 2019). She also is a Contributing Editor to the OUP edition of the prose letters of John Donne.

Project Collaborators

Dr. Jon Bath is an Associate Professor of Art and Art History and former Director of the Humanities and Fine Arts Digital Research Centre at the University of Saskatchewan. He is the Principal Investigator for the SSHRC-funded Post-Digital Book Arts project and was the co-lead of the Modeling and Prototyping Team of Implementing New Knowledge Environments (inke.ca). He has co-authored chapters for the Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book (2015), Doing Digital Humanities (Routledge, 2016) and The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities (2018), and co-edited Feminist War Games: Mechanisms of War, Feminist Values, and Interventional Games (Routledge, 2019).

Project Manager

Dr. Jennifer Farooq is the Administrative and Project Coordinator at the School of the Environment at University of Toronto. She is also an independent scholar and was project manager of GEMMS though the developmental life of the project. 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).

Past Researchers and Research Assistants

Nicole Maceira Cumming, PhD candidate, University of Strathclyde and the University of Glasgow.

Dr. Catherine Evans, University of Sheffield and Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of Manchester.

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.

Abigail Hill, PhD candidate, Boston College.

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

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

Dr. Adam Richter, University of Toronto, a member of the GEMMS team since 2016.

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

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

Dr. Lucy Underwood, University of Cambridge and honorary research fellow at Warwick.

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

Dr. Hannah Kirby Wood, PhD University of Toronto, Assistant Professor, St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan.

Dr. Hannah Yip, University of Manchester, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow.

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 one of the Directors 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).