Dr Ian Calvert

My research focuses on the literary afterlives of classical texts and antiquity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; I have a particular interest in English translations of epic poetry. My book Virgil's English Translators: Civil Wars to Restoration (2021) examines the print and manuscript translations of Virgil that were produced in the middle decades of the seventeenth century. It argues that writers in this period translated Virgil in order to display and interrogate their political loyalties, articulate personal responses to past traumas and express their hopes for the country’s future. I have also published articles on John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and other poet-translators, in The Review of English Studies, The International Journal of the Classical Tradition; Translation and Literature and The Seventeenth Century, as well as a survey article in Literature Compass on Classics and eighteenth-century literature. I am currently working on an edition of Pope's translation of Homer for Oxford University Press.

Teaching

I teach, or have taught, on the following courses: 

(English Y1) Transformations; Approaches to Poetry; Critical Issues; Literature 1550-1740

(English Y2) Literature 1740-1900; Gender, Desire, and the Renaissance Stage; The Art of Grief; Paradise Lost: Inception and Reception; Revenge Tragedy; Satire; Writing the City

(English Y3) Celebrity Culture: Icons, Industry, and Aesthetics; Literature-Enslavement-Liberation; Novel Territories: Eighteenth-Century Prose Fiction; Dissertation

(English MA) Introduction to Literary Research; Intertextual Shakespeare; Reimagining Shakespeare

(ELCE) Literature from Milton to Johnson

(Classical Studies Y1) Epic; Literature

(Classical Studies Y2) Legacy

(Classical Studies Y3) Dissertation

I also taught on the following units on our previous curricula:

(English Y1): Critical Practice; Approaches to Shakespeare

(English Y2): Literature 2: 1500-1700

(English Y3) Literature 3: 1700-1830

(Classical Reception MA) Classical Receptions in English Poetry: A Masterclass

(ELCE) Poetry; Early Modern Drama; Shakespeare and the Traditions of the English Stage; Romantic and Victorian Poetry.