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Academics

Dr Diane Purkiss

Fellow in English

Welcome

I am an English faculty member, but I’m also a published historian. 

How can that be?  Much of my research is about fitting texts together to make the picture of the past more complex; some of the fragments count as literature, others don’t.

I have an ongoing interest in early modern witchcraft, and am working on a project in that area, and I also work on the English Civil War, on which I’ve just published two books.  But my current research projects are on the history of food in Britain and how it affects and is affected by everything else that happens here, and on the dissolution of the monasteries, and above all what difference it made to the people of England. 

I’m also one half of a published children’s author called Tobias Druitt.  The other half is my son Michael, who is twelve years old.  As a result I have a renewed interest in both classical myth and in British children’s literature, especially the influence of folklore. 

Because I believe very strongly that academics have a responsibility to communicate with a public beyond the walls of the university, I review regularly for the broadsheet press, and make frequent radio and occasional tv appearances.  But I’d rather be in the Bodleian.

Research Interests

The history of food in England; the dissolution of the English monasteries, the court of Henry VIII and sixteenth-century religious orders; witches, wizards, fairies and ghosts; the English Civil War; writer's block; folklore; Shakespeare and other Renaissance drama; Milton; women's writing; Classical Greek influences on Renaissance literature; historiography and theorisations of history; psychoanalysis; popular culture; feminism and feminist theory; folktales and folklore; writing for children in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Other projects include a study of children in early modern England, and an essay collection on early modern girls. 

I also review the TLS, the Sunday Telegraph, the Telegraph and the Guardian, and appear frequently on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour and on BBC TV.

Current Projects

Contracted: A History of Good in England, HarperCollins, due 2008; The Lost World:The dissolution of the English monasteries, HarperCollins, due out 2010.  A history of British foor reinserts food history into what should be its central plae in mainstream hisory; a history of the dissolution of the monasteries features a desperate king, ambitious women and unruly nuns, both for HarperCollins.

In Preparation: Shakespeare and the Supernatural, contracted to Routledge/Taylor Francis, due 2008.  Shakespeare and the Changing Body, in discussion with Princeton University Press; Corydon and the Siege of Troy, children's book with Michael Dowling, the third in the Corydon trilogy; The Knight of Swords, new children's book.

Recent Publications

  • The dissolution of the English monasteries (HarperCollins, 2010)
  • 'Fractious: girls tell tales of witchcraft' in Shakespeare and Oral Culture, ed. Mary Ellen Lamb (New York: Ashgate, 2008)
  • 'Marvell and little girls; should we worry?' in Early Girls, ed. Naomi Yavneh and Naomi J Miller (New York: Ashgate, 2008)
  • A History of Food in England (HarperCollins, 2008)
  • Shakespeare and the Supernatural (Routledge/Taylor Francis, 2008)
  • The English Civil War: A People's History (HarperCollins, 2006)
  • with M. Dowling, Corydon and the Fall of Atlantis (London: Simon and Schuster, 2006)
  • Literature, Gender, and Politics during the English Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2005)
  • with M. Dowling, Corydon and the Island of Monsters (London: Simon and Schuster, 2005)
  • 'The ghost of popular culture' in Shakespeare and Popular Culture, ed. Stuart Gillespie (Arden Critical Readers, 2003)
  • 'History and psychoanalysis' in History and Theory, ed. Garthine Walker and Edward Arnold (2003)
  • 'Losing babies, losing women: attending to women's stories in Scottish witchcraft trials' in Attending to Women in Early Modern England, ed. (University of Delaware Press, 2002)
  • At The Bottom of the Garden (New York: New York University Press, 2001)
  • 'Medea in the Renaissance' in Medea in Performance, ed. Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh and Oliver Taplin (Legenda, Oxford University Press, 2000)
  • 'Old Wives' Tales Retold: The Fairy Queen in Drama and Popular Culture' in The Double Voice, ed. Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke (Macmillan, 2000)
  • 'Sounds of Silence: Fairies and Incest in Scottish Witchcraft Stories (pp.81-99)' in Languages of Witchcraft, ed. Stuart Clark (2000)
  • Troublesome Things: a history of fairies and fairy stories (Allen Lane/Penguin, 2000)
  • 'Blood, sacrifice, marriage and death: why Iphigeneia and Mariam have to die' in Women and Writing, Special Issue, Volume 6 No. 1 (1999)
  • 'Dismembering and Remembering: The English Civil War and Male Identity' in The English Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination, ed. Claude Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1999)
  • 'The Children of Medea: Euripides, Louise Woodward and Deborah Eappen' in Cardozo Law Review (1999)
  • 'Three Tragedies by Renaissance Women, edition of Iphigeneia in Aulis, by Lady Jane Lumley, The Tragedie of Antonie, by Lady Mary Sidney, The Tragedie of Mariam, by Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland' in Penguin Renaissance Dramatists Series, ed. John Pitcher (1998)
  • 'The queen on stage: Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Cathage and the representation of Elizabeth I' in Representing Dido, ed. Michael Burden (London: Faber, 1998)
  • 'Invasions: female prophecy and female bewitchment in the case of Margaret Muschamp' in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 17 (1998), 235-53
  • The Witch in History: Early Modern and Late Twentieth Century Representations (London and New York: Routledge, 1996)
  • 'Desire and its deformities: fantasies of witchcraft in the English Civil War' in Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 27 (1996), 103-32
  • 'Women's stories of witchcraft in early modern England: the house, the body, the child' in Representations of the Self in Early Modern Britian, 7 (1995), 408-32
  • Women's Renaissance: Elizabeth Cary's Tragedie of Mariam and Edward II and Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Judaorum in Edition of Elizabeth Cary's Tragedie of Mariam and The History of the Life, Reign and Death of Edward II and Aemilia Lanyer's Salve Deus (London: William Pickering, 1994)
  • 'The lecherous professor revisited: Plato, Padogogy and the scene of harrassment' in Rethinking Sexual Harrassment, ed. Clare Brant and Yun Lee Too (London: Sage, 1994)
  • 'Public Disturbances and Public Speaking: Mary Astell' in Baetyl: The Journal of Women's Literature, 1 (1993), 32-58
  • Women, Texts and Histories 1575-1760
  • 'Producing the voice, consuming the body: subjectivity, fasting and reproduction in seventeenth-century women's prophetic writings' in Women/Writing/History, ed. Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman (London: Batsford, 1992)
  • 'Minding the story' in Women, Texts and Histories 1575-1760, ed. Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss (Routledge, 1992)
  • 'Material Girls: the seventeenth-century woman debate' in Women, Texts and Histories 1575-1760, ed. Claire Brant and Diane Purkiss (Routledge, 1992)
  • 'Women's Rewritings of Myth in Contemporary Poetry' in The Feminist Companion to Mythology, ed. Carolyne Larrington (London: Pandora, 1992)

Academic Biography

  • Fellow and Tutor of English, Keble College (2000 - present)
  • Professor of English, Exeter University (1998 - 2000)
  • Lecturer in English, University of Reading (1993 - 1998)
  • Lecturer in English, University of East Anglia (1991 - 1993)
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College Contact Details

Dr Diane Purkiss
Keble College
Oxford
OX1 3PG
UK
Telephone: 01865 272766
Fax: 01865 272705
Email: diane.purkiss@keble.ox.ac.uk
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