BA (London), MPhil (Cambridge), DPhil (Sussex).

Femke is a member of the Centre of the Study of the Renaissance and holds a five year Global Research Fellowship at Warwick's Institute of Advanced Study to work on disordered emotion in early modern English literature. The interdisciplinary project examines the use of 'literary therapeutics' in the period to probe how early modern readers and writers engaged with texts to articulate, understand, and regulate emotions. The interest in this topic grows partly out of her previous research on the role of affect in early modern female religious reading and writing explored in her monograph Women and the Bible: Religious Reading and Writing in Early Modern England

 

Femke has previously held AHRC and Leverhulme Early Career Fellowships at Warwick. She works on texts from across the period, from the early sixteenth, to the late seventeenth, century. She has worked on the history of reading, and on early modern women writers, and these remain current interests.

She also has strong research interests in poetry and psychoanalysis, including clinical perspectives, and is currently conceiving an additional project that compares the poetic with the psychoanalytic (therapeutic) process.

She is the co-convenor of IAS research network 'Psychoanalysis Across the Disciplines' , which organises a termly programme of events.

Publications

Monograph:

Women and the Bible in Early Modern England: Religious Reading and Writing (Oxford University Press, 2013), reviewed in the Times Higher Education: Women and the Bible THE

Journal Articles:

'Therapies for Melancholy in the Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir Wiliam Temple (1652-4)', The Seventeenth Century Journal, currently published online: Seventeenth Century, forthcoming in specific volume.

‘Reading Christ the Book: Iconography and Cultures of Reading in Aemelia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611)’, Studies in Philology, 109. 2 (2012) 311-332

‘Seventeenth Century Funeral Sermons and Exemplary Female Devotion: Gendered Spaces and Histories’, Renaissance & Reformation, special issue: Gendering Time and Space in Early Modern England, 35 (2012).

‘The Geneva and the King James Bibles: Legacies of Reading Practices’, Bunyan Studies, special issue: The English Bible (2012) 11-17.

‘Early Modern Women and Affective Devotional Reading’, European Review of History, special issue: The Passions in European Political Thought and Literature 1600-1900, 17. 1 (2010), 53-75

‘Using a Collection to Discover Reading Practices: The British Library Geneva Bibles and a History of their Early Modern Readers’, Electronic British Library Journal (2006), art. 10,. 1-13

Book Chapters:

'Female Devotional Poetry', in Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Poetry ed. Catherine Bates (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press)

‘The Making of the Geneva Bible’, in The Oxford Handbook to the Early Modern Bible (forthcoming, Oxford University Press)

‘Early Modern Women’, in The Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine (forthcoming: Oxford University Press)

‘Popular Reading and Writing’ in Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England (forthcoming: Ashgate)

‘Of the Incomparable treasure of the Holy Scriptures’: The Geneva Bible in the Early Modern Household’, in Literature and Popular Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield (Ashgate, 2009)