Abigail Williams

I have been a Fellow at St Peter's since 2001, shortly after I finished my doctorate, which was on politics and literature in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, and in particular, the development of Whig literary culture in that period. I am also interested in Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; textual criticism; eighteenth century poetic miscellanies and popular reception history; obliteration and the revision of eighteenth century texts. I help to organise a termly seminar for St Peter's English students, together with my colleagues, Dr Tessa Roynon and Dr Tara Stubbs, in which visiting speakers come along to tell us what they have done with their English degrees.
At St Peter's I teach undergraduate courses in the period 1640-1832, and the Shakespeare paper. In the Faculty, I lecture on Restoration comedy, High and Low Culture, Pope, Swift, Montagu, Behn and Rochester. Along with Ros Ballaster, Christine Gerrard, and David Womersley, I have also recently started teaching a third year syndicated option on 'Grub Street', which explores the ephemeral productions of the early eighteenth century alongside more canonical texts. I have offered and taught MSt options on Poetry and Politics, and the literature of Grub Street, and am currently co-convening the Mst 1500-1780. I have supervised doctoral theses on: celebrity and female actors in the eighteenth century; Defoe and historiography; quotation of Shakespeare in the eighteenth-century novel, and the correspondence of Jacob Tonson. I convene the Restoration to Reform seminar, the Faculty's eighteenth-century graduate research seminar, currently held at St Peter's College.