Staff profile

Academic Bio

I joined Durham as Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies in September 2018, following stints as Research Associate on the ERC-funded project Crossroads of Knowledge: The Place of Literature in Early Modern England at the University of Cambridge (2014-2018), and Haslam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (2013-2014). Before that, I completed my PhD in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York.

Current Research Activities

My research interests are diverse, but they focus on the relationships between literature, natural philosophy (aka early 'science'), and theology in England, circa 1500-1700. I am particularly interested in the ways that literary texts represent various forms of knowing and knowledge as an embodied, passionate, and historically situated set of practices and experiences. 

My first monograph, Taste and Knowledge in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2020), investigated the relation between the physical sense of taste, and taste as a metaphorical term used to denote various forms of knowledge and judgement (including, but not only, aesthetic taste). In the early modern period, I argued, taste in both these 'senses' played a key role in the cultivation of humanist erudition, in the so-called ‘scientific revolution,’ in theological debates about how best to access divine truth, and in the experience and articulation of intersubjective knowledge and sexual desire. 

My second monograph, Science as Child's Play in Seventeenth Century England: Innocence, Experience, Experiment was published with Palgrave Pivot in January 2025. This short book reveals the central importance of children to the early development of experimental science, both as rhetorical exemplars and as active participants. Focusing on the work of the early Royal Society, I show - amongst other things - how ideas about childish innocence, sensory acuity, and playfulness led to their valorization as archetypal proto-empiricists and objective observors, in ways which subsequently shaped broader cultural ideas about childhood and education. 

I am currently working on two more book projects. The first, Knowledge and Power: A Critical History, explores the origins of the ‘knowledge is power’ aphorism in early modern England, as well as its afterlife in Enlightenment philosophy and politics, in twentieth-century critical theory, and in modern popular, political, and educational cultures. I show how the assertion that 'knowledge is power' has, historically, been deployed both in a spirit of empancipatory optimism, and of cynical suspicion. In either case, I argue, the principle is frequently inadequate, inaccurate, and even destructive, and has contributed (amongst other things) to a growing climate of anti-intellectualism in the twenty-first century. 

The second ongoing project, On Overreading: Shadows in the Water, starts with a question: what distinguishes an insightful close reading of a text from an implausible overreading? Offering a longue dureé investigation of ideas about and practices of over-intepretation, via figures including Aristotle, Macrobius, Montaigne, Freud, and Derrida, I scrutinize overreading's entwinement with superfluity and error, whilst ultimately making a case for its vitality as an exegetical strategy with much to contribute to learning and teaching in the twenty-first century academy. 

I am also interested in the field of Critical University Studies, particularly the ways in which the kinds of knowledge produced in universities in the twenty-first century is shaped by the historical, cultural, socio-economic, and personal contexts of research and teaching. Some thoughts about this topic are available as a blogpost here. 

I welcome enquiries from postgraduate students with interests in intersections between literature, theology, and natural philosophy, and the senses and embodiment, in Renaissance England.

Other Research Activities

I have co-edited two collections. The Poesy of Scientia in Early Modern England, with Subha Mukherji (Palgrave, 2024) explores interconnections between the modes of knowing that we now associate with the rubrics ‘literature’ and ‘science’ at a formative point in their early development. Sensing the Sacred in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, with Emilie Murphy and Robin Macdonald (Routledge, 2018), traces transformations in attitudes toward, ideas about, and experiences of religion and the senses in Europe between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries.

I am also co-curator of an online exhibition hosted by the Fitzwilliam Museum, available here. This exhibition, titled Renaissance Spaces of Knowing: Privacy and Performance, explores the locations in which knowledge was generated, moving from public spaces including the marketplace, the law-courts, the theatre, the church, and the schoolroom, to private and quasi-private spaces including the garden, the study, and the bedroom. 

 

Authored book

• Swann, E. (2025). Science as Child's Play in Seventeenth-Century England: Innocence, Experience, Experiment. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-75849-2
• Swann, E. L. (2020). Taste and Knowledge in Early Modern England. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108767576

Book review

• Swann, E. L. (2021). Review of /Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen/, by Wendy Wall
• Swann, E. (2018). Review of /From Gluttony to Enlightenment: The World of Taste in Early Modern Europe/ by Viktoria von Hoffmann. French Studies, 72(1), 113-14
• Swann, E. L. (2018). Review of /Sociable Knowledge: Natural History and the Nation in Early Modern Britain/ by Elizabeth Yale. English Studies, 99(2), 219-20
• Swann, E. L. (2016). Review of /Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture/, ed. Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhuis. Renaissance Studies, 30(3), 474-77
• Swann, E. L. (2014). Review of /Sense and the Senses in Early Modern Art and Cultural Practice/, ed. Alice E. Sanger and Siv Tove Kulbrandstand Walker. Journal of the Northern Renaissance, 6,

Chapter in book

• Swann, E. (2024). From Philosopher's Stone to Phosphorus: Robert Boyle's Illuminating Experiments. In S. Mukherji, & E. L. Swann (Eds.), The Poesy of Scientia in Early Modern England (81-107). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51800-3_4
• Swann, E. L. (2020). ‘Sweet above compare’? Disputing about taste in Venus and Adonis, Love's Labour's Lost, Othello, and Troilus and Cressida. In S. (. Smith (Ed.), Shakespeare / sense (85-109). Bloomsbury. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474273268.ch-004
• Swann, E. L. (2018). 'To dream to eat Books': Bibliophagy, Bees, and Literary Taste in Early Modern Commonplace Culture. In J. Scott-Warren, & A. Zurcher (Eds.), Text, food, and the early modern reader : eating words (69-88). Routledge
• Swann, E. L. (2018). God's Nostrils: The Divine Senses in Early Modern England. In R. Macdonald, E. K. Murphy, & E. L. Swann (Eds.), Sensing the sacred in medieval and early modern culture (220-244). Routledge
• Swann, E. L. (2018). Nosce Teipsum: The Senses of Self-Knowledge in Early Modern England. In S. Mukherji, & T. Stuart-Buttle (Eds.), Literature, belief and knowledge in early modern England : knowing Faith (195-214). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71359-5_9

Conference Paper

• Swann, E. L. (2016, December). Hazarding All: Risk and Knowledge in Early Modern England. Paper presented at Scientiae: Disciplines of Knowing in the Early Modern World, University of Oxford
• Swann, E. L. (2014, December). 'Knowledge is Power'? Epistemology and Vulnerability in Early Modern England. Paper presented at Reading Early Modern Studies Conference, University of Reading
• Swann, E. L. (2016, December). God’s Nostrils: The Divine Senses in Early Modern England. Paper presented at Early Modern Seminar, Durham University
• Swann, E. L. (2012, December). The 'tast of science': Natural Philosophy and Taste in Seventeenth-Century England. Paper presented at Society for Renaissance Studies Biennial Conference, University of Manchester
• Swann, E. L. (2013, December). 'A Taste of Spirituall Things': Spirituality and Sweetness in Early Modern Devotional Literature. Paper presented at Sensing the Sacred: Religion and the Senses, 1300-1800, University of York
• Swann, E. L. (2019, December). Robert Boyle’s 'Abstruse Phaenomina': From Philosopher’s Stone to Phosphorus. Paper presented at Secrecy and Openness in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, New York University
• Swann, E. L. (2013, December). Dulce et utile: Diagnosis, Dietetics, and Taste in Early Modern Poetics. Paper presented at Reading and Health in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800, Newcastle University
• Swann, E. L. (2019, December). Shadows in the Water: Over-reading Thomas Traherne. Paper presented at Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Toronto
• Swann, E. L. (2015, December). Erotic Epistemologies in Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems. Paper presented at nnual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Berlin
• Swann, E. L. (2015, December). The Meaning of Making: Self-Experiment and Knowledge, circa 1660-1730 B. Paper presented at ritish Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Annual Conference, University of Oxford
• Swann, E. L. (2014, December). The Subject of Allegory: Sensation and Subjectivity on the Late Medieval and Early Modern Stage. Paper presented at International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo
• Swann, E. L. (2015, December). Vulnerable Knowledge in Early Modern England. Paper presented at Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies Seminar, University of York
• Swann, E. L. (2020, December). 'A straine above mortality': The Ends of Knowledge in Early Modern England. Paper presented at Interdisciplinary Renaissance and Early Modern Seminar, University of Leeds
• Swann, E. L. (2011, December). ‘Imitation Sweet': Early Seventeenth-Century Commonplace Culture and the Bibliophagic Trope. Paper presented at Eating Words: Text, Image, Food, University of Cambridge
• Swann, E. L. (2016, December). The Consolations of (Natural) Philosophy: Knowing Death in the Early Royal Society. Paper presented at London Renaissance Seminar, Birkbeck, University of London
• Swann, E. L. (2018, December). Nothing Clearer, Nothing Darker: Robert Boyle’s 'Glimmerings of Light'. Paper presented at Ordering Knowledge from Bacon to the Shelleys, University of Strasbourg
• Swann, E. L. (2015, December). Writing New Histories of Embodiment (seminar paper). Paper presented at Annual Meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, Vancouver
• Swann, E. L. (2010, December). ‘Question your teaspoons': Cutlery and Consumption in Seventeenth-Century England. Paper presented at Making Publics Summer Symposium, McGill University, Montreal
• Swann, E. L. (2011, December). ‘Loves sensuall Emperie': Erotic and Epistemic Taste in Ovids Banquet of Sense. Paper presented at The Senses in Early Modern England, 1485-1668, Shakespeare’s Globe and Birkbeck, University of London
• Swann, E. L. (2013, December). Bitter Sin, Salvific Sweetness: Piety and Palate in Early Seventeenth-Century Devotional Literature. Paper presented at The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures, University of Bern
• Swann, E. L. (2016, December). Nosce Te Ipsum: Early Modern Senses of Self-Knowledge. Paper presented at Society for Renaissance Studies Biennial Conference, University of Glasgow
• Swann, E. L. (2018, December). 'Those Fruits of Natural Knowledge': Rhetorical and Experimental Taste. Paper presented at Subjective Sciences: A Workshop on Taste and Connoisseurship in Early Modern Europe, University College London
• Swann, E. L. (2013, December). The “Palate of the Understanding”: Taste and Knowledge in Early Modern Culture. Paper presented at Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies Research Seminar, University of Kent

Edited book

• Mukherji, S., & Swann, E. L. (Eds.). (2024). The Poesy of Scientia in Early Modern England. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51800-3
• Swann, E. L., Macdonald, R., & Murphy, E. K. (Eds.). (2018). Sensing the Sacred in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Routledge

Other (Digital/Visual Media)

• Swann, E. L., Mukherji, S., & Suthren, C. (2019). Renaissance Spaces of Knowing: Privacy and Performance

Presentation

• Swann, E. L. (2014, December). 'Readyng is the best medicine': Literary and Therapeutic Taste in Early Modern Miscellanies. Paper presented at Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, New York