Dr Hazel Wilkinson

• BA (Hons) (Oxford)
• MA (York)
• PhD (UCL)

I am a Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) in the English Department, specialising in eighteenth-century and early modern literature. I am also Deputy Director of the Institute for Data and AI.

I joined the University as a Birmingham Fellow in 2017. Before this I was a Junior Research Fellow in English Literature at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. I completed my PhD at University College London under the supervision of Professor Henry Woudhuysen. I also hold an MA in Renaissance Literature from the University of York, and a BA in English from the University of Oxford. 

I have held fellowships at the Alan Turing Institute (2021–22), the Huntington Library, California; the Library of Congress, Washington DC; the Library Company of Philadelphia; and the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford. I have previously held the Mark Samuels Lasner Fellowship in Printing History (2016), and the Katherine F. Pantzer Jr. Fellowship in Bibliography (2015). I was the winner of the 2016 Göttingen Dialog in Digital Humanities, and at the University of Cambridge I won a Vice Chancellor's Public Engagement with Research award (2016). 

From 2020–2022 I was Principal Investigator on the AHRC funded project 'Compositor: Recovering the Grammar of Ornament'. 

I am a member of the the executive board of the Centre for Printing History and Culture, and a member of the Steering Committee of the Birmingham Eighteenth Century Centre.

I am General Editor (with Caroline Archer-Parré and Malcom Dick) of the Printing History and Culture series at Peter Lang. Together with my co-editors, I welcome proposals for monographs or edited collections on any aspect of global, national and local printing history and print culture, and related arts and crafts. 

I teach the second-year modules ‘Shakespeare’s Sisters’ and ‘Stories of the Novel’. 

I welcome enquiries from potential PhD students in the following areas: the literature and culture of the long eighteenth century; the history of the book; digital humanities; literary editing; poetry; renaissance literature; Edmund Spenser; Alexander Pope; reception studies. Current supervision projects include the reception of Shakespeare in the eighteenth century.

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Find out more - our PhD English Literature  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

I am interested in eighteenth-century literature and print culture; the reception of early modern literature; and book history (particularly typography). I have a strong interest in the digital humanities, particularly the use of computer vision and machine learning for the analysis of early printed books. 

My first monograph, Edmund Spenser and the Eighteenth-Century Book (Cambridge, 2017) was a study of the eighteenth-century editions of the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser. It was the winner of the Isabel MacCaffrey Award for the best book on Spenser published in 2017 and 2018. 

I was awarded an AHRC Leadership Fellowship (2020–22), for my project 'Recovering The Grammar of Ornament'. The project produced new research into ornamental type that is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. The aim of the project was to help us understand both what ornamental typography meant to eighteenth-century readers, and how we can use it today as bibliographical evidence. The project builds on my work on Compositor, a database of over 1 million eighteenth-century printers' ornaments that uses computer vision and machine learning. In 2025 I received a Pump Priming Award from the Institute of Data and AI to develop the Compositor project.

I am currently co-editing, with Professor Marcus Walsh, Alexander Pope’s Ethic Epistles, for The Oxford Edition of the Writings of Alexander Pope. I am also working on papers on Henry Fielding, the Earl of Rochester, and Aphra Behn.

I am a member of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the Bibliographical Society. I contribute book reviews to The Review of English Studies, Critical Quarterly, and the Times Literary Supplement.