Research Projects

The Oxford Francis Bacon

15-volume critical edition of the works of Francis Bacon (1561-1626), the Elizabethan-Jacobean lawyer, natural philosopher, and statesman.

Comparative History of Philology in Early Modern Asia

A collaboration between Oxford, Princeton, and Columbia to produce a comparitive study of philology, broadly conceived, in India and China between 1450 and 1750.

Cultures of Knowledge: An Intellectual Geography of the Seventeenth Century Republic of Letters

A collaborative, interdisciplinary research project using digital methods to reassemble and interpret the correspondence networks of the early modern period.

Digital Miscellanies Index

The Digital Miscellanies Index provides a searchable record of the contents of more than 1,600 poetic miscellanies published between 1680 and 1800.

The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne

A new critical edition in 16 volumes which will introduce Donne's sermons for a new generation of readers.

The Thomas Gray Archive

A collaborative digital archive and research project aiming to facilitate and support the study, research, and teaching of Gray's life and works.

The Holinshed Project

Stimulating a comprehensive reappraisal of Holinshed's Chronicles through new editions and scholarly resources.

The Works of Lucy Hutchinson

A new complete edition of the writings of the seventeenth-century translator, poet, and biographer (1620-1681).

The Newton Project

Dedicated to publishing in full an online edition of all of Sir Isaac Newton’s (1642–1727) writings — whether they were printed or not.

Recovering Europe's Parliamentary Culture, 1500-1700: A New Approach to Representative Institutions

Funded by the John Fell fund, the project explores the culture of Europe’s Parliaments, States, Estates, Diets, and Cortes, asking how it was expressed in images, language, writing, and symbolic practices. It draws on literature, history, political philosophy, the reception of the classical tradition, art and material culture to investigate the literary, political, and visual discourses and shared experiences of representative politics across early modern Europe.

Rediscovering Rycote

Records from the Bodleian Library reveal the history of a lost Tudor mansion in Oxfordshire. 

Shakespeare's World

A pioneering effort in crowdsourcing the transcription of Early Modern manuscripts.

Oxford Early Modern South Asia Project

A project examining the roles of service communities in shaping South Asia’s political, commercial and cultural dynamism from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century.

Stories of Survival: Recovering the Connected Histories of Eastern Christianity in the Early Modern World

5-year research project funded by the European Research Council (2015-2020), investigating the history of Eastern Christianity from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

The Stuart Successions Project

Three-year AHRC-funded project which examines writing printed at moments of royal and protectoral succession in Britain between 1603 and 1702.

Travel, Transculturality, and Identity in England, c. 1550 - 1700

A 5-year European Research Council funded project that aims to investigate how mobility in the great age of travel and discovery shaped English perceptions of human idenity based on cultural identification and difference.

DEx: A Database of Dramatic Extracts

The aim of the digital project DEx: A Database of Dramatic Extracts is to help researchers to overcome these challenges by engaging the archives with digital tools, in order to open up the early modern theatre archive and make it more accessible and usable. DEx seeks to facilitate and promote the study of the role of dramatic extracts in theatre history, audience reception, early modern print and manuscript culture, and the history of reading.

            A report by a former DPhil student in English on working with DEx is available to read here.