Dr Edward W Holberton

My research interests lie in seventeenth and early eighteenth century literature, especially the work of Andrew Marvell and John Milton, Early Modern Literature and Diplomacy, and Early Modern Literature’s relationships with the Atlantic World.

My 2025 monograph Atlantic Circulations: Literature, Reception and Imperial Identities, 1650-1750 looks at what the reception of literary texts across the Anglophone Atlantic can show us about early modern imperial identities, focussing on texts by George Herbert, John Milton, Anne Bradstreet, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, John Dryden, Cotton Mather, Edward Taylor, and James Thomson.

I have an ongoing interest in Literature of the Civil War and Restoration periods, especially the work of Andrew Marvell and John Milton, and the political contexts of their writing. In 2008 I published the monograph Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate: Culture, Politics, and Institutions, and co-edited the 2019 Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell with Martin Dzelzainis. I have published a number of articles on the European and particularly diplomatic contexts of Marvell's writing, which have often led me to think about material texts and their transnational circulation.  

I am also interested in early modern and early eighteenth century reading practices, and how material evidence from archives and heritage libraries can illuminate practices of reading.    

My postgraduate research teaching includes recent doctoral projects on satire and news culture in the later seventeenth century, early modern literature's representations of labour, and the the circulation of poems in manuscript by royalist readers. I would be pleased to supervise PhD research connected with any of the areas of my research interests. Please get in touch if you are considering working on a connected topic.