Biography
Professor Paulina Kewes is the Helen Morag Fellow and Clarendon Associate Professor of English Literature at Jesus College, University of Oxford.
Paulina received her doctorate from the University of Oxford. She held positions as a Junior Research Fellow at University College, Oxford, and at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth before returning to Oxford as a Tutorial Fellow in 2003. She is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and co-investigator, with Andrew McRae, on The Stuart Successions Project.
I think what is crucially important is how political ideas not just developed but how they were disseminated, communicated to the wider public, and debated by them. The seventeenth century is of course the great age of political thought in England. That’s the age of Hobbes and that’s the age of Locke. But it’s also the great age of drama.
Paulina’s research lies at the intersection of literary studies and history, as demonstrated in her most recent books Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England (2014), edited with Susan Doran, and The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles (2013), edited with Ian Archer and Felicity Heal. She is an expert in early modern historiography, political writing, and drama ranging from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth century, including Shakespeare, Jonson, and Dryden.
Paulina’s future research includes further interdisciplinary work on the politics of drama and civic entertainments in the Tudor and Stuart periods.
