Professor Gillian Wright BA MA MPhil PhD

Department of English Literature
Professor of English and Irish Literature

Contact details

Telephone: +44 (0)121 414 5671
Email: g.wright@bham.ac.uk
Twitter: @gwrightbham

Address: Arts Building
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

I hold a chair in English and Irish Literature. My research and teaching both focus on literature from the early modern period, and in particular on poetry, women’s writing, and book history and editing. I am a General Editor on the AHRC-funded Cambridge edition of The Works of Aphra Behn, for which I am editing Behn’s poetry. I also teach contemporary Irish fiction.

I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. I have held a number of leadership positions within my College, and most recently served as Director of the College of Arts and Law Graduate School and co-Site Director for the Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership at the University of Birmingham.

Qualifications

BA, MA (Oxford)
MPhil, PhD (Glasgow)
Postgraduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (Birmingham)

Biography

I joined Birmingham as a lecturer in 2005, and was appointed to a senior lectureship in 2010, a readership in 2017, and a professorship in 2020. Previously I held full-time research posts at Nottingham Trent University and St John’s College, Oxford. I have also held visiting fellowships at the Institute of English Studies, London, and the Newberry Library, Chicago.

Teaching

I contribute to a wide range of undergraduate and MA modules, mainly focusing on the early modern period. I also teach contemporary Irish fiction.

Postgraduate supervision

I welcome applications relating to early modern English and Irish literature, and am especially interested in supervising Masters and PhD projects on women’s writing (particularly Aphra Behn), Restoration poetry, Irish literature, and environmental humanities.

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

Research

My research and teaching both focus on literature from the early modern period, and in particular on poetry, women’s writing, and book history and editing. I am a General Editor on the AHRC-funded Cambridge edition of The Works of Aphra Behn, for which I am editing Behn’s poetry. I also teach contemporary Irish fiction.

Other activities

I am the Director of the College of Arts and Law Graduate School, and am also one of the University’s Site Directors for the Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership.

Publications

Recent publications

Book

Wright, G 2019, The Restoration transposed: Poetry, place and literary history, 1660-1700. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108624817

Wright, G & Coolahan, M-L (eds) 2018, Katherine Philips: Form, Reception and Literary Contexts. Historical Women's Writing, Routledge, London.

Article

Wright, G 2025, 'Aphra Behn, Anne Wharton, and the Remaking of Rochester’s Reputation', The Review of English Studies, vol. 76, no. 2, pp. 157-173. https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgae083

Taylor, K & Wright, G 2025, 'Dr Cowley's Reading List: Annotation, Completion, and the Problem of Plants in Sex Libri Plantarum', The Seventeenth Century. https://doi.org/10.1080/0268117X.2025.2558647

Taylor, K & Wright, G 2024, 'Abraham Cowley's Sex Libri Plantarum and the "J.O." conundrum', Restoration, vol. 47, no. 2, pp. 3-25. <https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/298/article/917978>

Wright, G & Taylor, K 2023, '"The rich help of books": patterns of annotation in Latin and English versions of Abraham Cowley's Sex Libri Plantarum', The Seventeenth Century, vol. 38, no. 4, pp. 625-648. https://doi.org/10.1080/0268117X.2023.2198253

Wright, G 2020, 'Aphra Behn and Bishop Burnet', The Library, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 235–239. https://doi.org/10.1093/library/21.2.235

Taylor, K & Wright, G 2017, 'A computational approach to the poetry of Katherine Philips', Women's Writing.

Chapter (peer-reviewed)

Wright, G 2025, 'For the Bays Designed': Waller, Cowley, Philips. in S Zwicker & M Augustine (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Restoration Literature. 1 edn, Oxford Handbooks, Oxford University Press, Oxford. <https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-restoration-literature-9780192866035?cc=gb&lang=en&>

Wright, G 2022, Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke. in C Bates & P Cheney (eds), The Oxford History of Poetry in English: Sixteenth-Century British Poetry. vol. 4, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 569-583.

Chapter

Wright, G 2024, Nature in Cowley. in P Hammond & A Hadfield (eds), Words at War: The Contested Language of the English Civil War. Proceedings of the British Academy, British Academy, London, pp. 145-157. <https://global.oup.com/academic/product/words-at-war-9780197267622?cc=gb&lang=en&#>

Wright, G 2022, In Praise of Mr. Waller. in P Major (ed.), Edmund Waller (1606-1687): New Perspectives. 1 edn, Brill, Leiden, pp. 224-249. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004523135_011

Wright, G 2020, Aphra Behn's 'Oenone to Paris', John Dryden, and the Ovidian Complaint in Restoration Literary Culture. in SCE Ross & R Smith (eds), Early Modern Women's Complaint: Gender, Form, and Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 205-223.

Wright, G 2019, Fable and allegory. in The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Other contribution

Challinor, J & Wright, G (eds) 2019, Katherine Philips: Oxford Bibliographies Online: Renaissance and Reformation.. <https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195399301/obo-9780195399301-0206.xml>

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