Diane Purkiss
My period-specific research centres on two things: the supernatural (ghosts, fairies, witches), and the writers of the English Civil War, especially Milton and Marvell, but also women writers like Anna Trapnel and Brilliana Harley. I’m finishing revisions of a history of English food – for a trade press – and my new projects are a study of writer’s block from Homer to the present, and a microhistory of the Scottish witch, Andro Man, executed in 1597.
Recent publications include ‘“As like Hermione as is her picture”: the shadow of incest in The Winter’s Tale’, in Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England, ed. Naomi Miller and Karen Bamford, Ashgate, 2015, 75-92. Accepted for publication and due to appear in 2017 are ‘MS Eng. poet d. 49, Marvell manuscripts and miscellanies’, The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell, ed. Martin Dzelzainis and Edward Holberton, and ‘Ghosts’ and ‘Witches and Witchcraft’ in the Shakespeare Encyclopaedia, ed. Patricia Parker, Stanford University Press. I am also working with Naomi Miller on an essay collection for Palgrave, Literary Cultures and the Child, Volume I Medieval/Early Modern Literature and the Child, likely to be published in 2019.
