Dr Jennifer Batt

Broadly speaking, my research interests lie in eighteenth-century literature, book history and reception history, and digital humanities. I'm particularly interested in the publication and reception history of eighteenth-century poetry, and in exploring how poetic culture was constructed across a range of media, including newspapers, magazines, miscellanies and pamphlets. Before coming to Bristol, I was project manager of the Digital Miscellanies Index at the University of Oxford; this project created a freely available online database of the verse printed in thousands of eighteenth-century miscellanies. My current research explores the poetry that was published in eighteenth-century newspapers and magazines; this work has included collaborations with British Library Labs and with the Jean Golding Institute at the University of Bristol.

My work is interested in investigating how eighteenth-century poetic culture reached across social and geographical boundaries, and especially in tracing how it stretched beyond metropolitan or polite limits to include men and women in the provinces and of all social classes. I have a long standing interest in labouring-class writing, and I’ve written and published on severable labouring class poets, including Northamptonshire’s Mary Leapor, and the 'thresher poet' Stephen Duck. (You can see me talk about Duck here, and Leapor here.). My monograph, Class, Patronage and Poetry in Hanoverian England, was published in 2020.

I am also editing 'Lycidus' for the Cambridge University Press edition of the Works of Aphra Behn.

I am co-founder of the Centre for Material Texts. The Centre was established in 2017 in order to bring together scholars from across the Faculty of Arts, as well as librarians and creative professionals, in the exploration of material texts from the ancient world to the digital age. If you are interested in the Centre’s work, do check out our blog, twitter, or get in touch.

Research Supervision

I would welcome applications relating to the long eighteenth century, and particularly invite those relating to poetry, women’s writing, labouring-class writing, book history, or digital humanities.

Teaching

Undergraduate units I teach on include:

Literature 1550-1740
Literature 1740-1900
Eighteenth-Century Women’s Writing
Writing the Working Classes