Ben Wilkinson-Turnbull

I am a literary historian of the sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries. My research focuses on women’s writing, book history, politics, colonialism, and material culture from c.1500-1830.

At Royal Holloway I am the early modern post-doctoral research associate on Dr Matthew Smith's AHRC-funded research and schools engagement project 'Inclusive Histories. In this role I am working in partenership with the London Archives to explore the role marginalised groups played in the Pilgrimage of Grace, the English Civil War, and the American Revolution. This archival research will then be used to generate a teacher-facing resource that will promote a more inclusive approach to teaching the AQA GCSE History specification, ‘Britain: Power and the People c1170 to the present day’.

My first article, shortlisted for the Review of English Studies Essay Prize and in the top 4% of the journal's outputs, explored developing concepts of plagiarism by reconsidering the critical treatment of one of the first printed female-authored volumes of essays in English: Grace, Lady Gethin’s Reliquiæ Gethinianæ (1699). The second, published in Women’s Writing, considers how Isabella Whitney, the first women to publish a volume of poems in English under her own name, enjoyed a surprisingly long reception history in the long eighteenth century; raising questions of how gender contributed to an author’s desirability, economic value, and ultimate survival. Other recent publications include entries for The Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing, of which I am also a section editor, and a chapter in Swift in Context (CUP 2024) that rethinks Swift’s relationship with Esther Johnson, Maria Edgeworth, and contemporary women’s writers.  

I am also deeply interested in scholarly editing. With Christine Gerrard and Corrina Readioff, I am concluding a landmark Cambridge edition of Swift’s later political prose. A complimentary article, which considers a vital yet previously unknown Swiftian source in Cambridge University Library and was nominated for a conference prize by the British Society of Eighteenth Century Studies, is also underway. I have recently been invited to contribute to the first complete edition of Margaret Cavendish’s works. As a co-editor of Physical and Philosophical Opinions (1663) I will produce a collaborative interdisciplinary edition of her philosophical and medical treatises. Through my work as a research associate at UCL on the AHRC-funded ‘Shaping Scholarship: Early Donors to the Bodleian Library’, I am the co-author of a database of early donations to the Bodleian Library.

I am also passionate about disseminating my research through public and community engagement work. I have spoken about my research on BBC radio/TV, and have produced taster talks, archival open days, outreach summer schools, exhibitions, family days, blog posts, and training sessions for tour guides. For a recent example, produced in conjunction with my curation work on the major exhibition “Gifts and Books” at the Bodleian Library, take a look at my blog post on Early Women Donors, Colonialism, and Early Chinese Books in The Bodleian Conveyor.