Before Loughborough, Elaine was Lecturer in English and General Studies at the Cambridge College of Arts and Technology (which has since morphed into Anglia Polytechnic University), and before that was based in the USA from 1981-83 as a Harkness Fellow. Her BA (1978) and PhD (1984) are from the University of Birmingham, and her Master’s degree from Essex University (1980). Having been a Welsh child growing up in England in the 1950s and 60s, Elaine has an enduring interest in the experience of migration.
Elaine is a Fellow of the English Association, and a member of the AHRC Peer Review College.
In recent years Elaine has been employed full-time on research, and has engaged only occasionally in undergraduate teaching. She does though love being with students, and for many years contributed to (and sometimes ran) modules in Critical Theory, Approaches to Poetry, Women’s Writing, and Renaissance and Restoration Drama at undergraduate level, and to Research Methods and a range of modules on early-modern culture for Master’s students.
As a 1970s feminist, Elaine began her career with the desire to contribute to the rediscovery of forgotten women writers, and both her first book, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1649-1688 and her current project as PI on the AHRC-funded Editing Aphra Behn in the Digital Age are testimony that commitment has always inspired her. Both those areas of work also contain the seeds of other dimensions of her activities. Much 17th-century women’s writing, for instance, is in genres not generally regarded as literary – those women wrote political pamphlets, religious meditations, cookery books and midwifery manuals rather more than they composed poetry, plays, or fiction. As a result, her research has usually been inter-disciplinary, requiring her to explore the history of medicine and the theology of early Quakers and Baptists, for example, as well as the aesthetic dimensions of literature. Those enquiries also prompted other forays, for instance into the (mostly male-authored) lineage of the English-language midwifery manual (see her The Birth of Mankind, 1540-1654). Elaine has also ventured into the 18th century to finish The Collected Verse of John, Lord Hervey (1696-1744)(Cambridge University Press, 2016) for the late Bill Overton.
Over the years, this work has been supported not only by Loughborough University, but also by grants from the AHRB, the AHRC, the British Academy, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Harkness Fellowships, the Harry Ransom Center, the Houghton Library, the Huntington Library, Princeton University Library, the University of Illinois, the Wellcome Trust, and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.
These days, Aphra Behn (1640?-1689) keeps her busy, both because she is editing several of her plays for the forthcoming Cambridge Edition of the Works of Aphra Behn, and because she manages the international team involved with that project. Behn was not only Britain’s first professional woman playwright, but also a poet, fiction-writer, and translator from French. Those involved with bringing the Cambridge Edition to completion include academics who hail from the USA, Canada, Australia, France and Austria, as well as from across the UK. The year 2020 will see the appearance of the first volumes of the Cambridge Edition, alongside a range of activities celebrating the 350th anniversary of the debut of Behn’s first play. Watch this space.
Elaine's current PhD students are working on Aphra Behn, whose diverse oeuvre has also provided topics for earlier doctoral projects she has supervised. Most of the theses she has guided have concerned some aspect of 17th-century culture, ranging from investigations into early Quakers and Baptists to studies of early-modern perceptions of the human body. Some have had a more purely literary focus, including topics such as the novels of Frances Burney, and the verse of John Dryden. Elaine welcomes enquiries from prospective PhD students in any of these areas.
Much as Elaine loves working with students and conferring with colleagues, it has always been important to her to communicate with people beyond the academy – perhaps most of all because she comes from a family whose members have not usually stayed in education beyond the minimum leaving age. She has participated in various television and radio broadcasts (including The One Show and Woman’s Hour, and a live evening-long programme on Radio 3 commemorating the execution of Charles I), co-written (with her colleague Catie Gill) a booklet about the prophecies of early Quaker women, and she is currently working on several projects designed to popularise understanding of the achievements of Aphra Behn.
Elaine's external activities within the academic world have included membership of the AHRB Postgraduate Panel (2003-07) and the AHRC Peer Review College (2007-10, and 2020-23); acting as External Examiner for PhD theses at more than 20 universities in the UK and overseas; and regularly speaking at academic venues that range from international conferences to postgraduate research seminars.