Emily Buffey

My teaching and research cover a wide spectrum, although my main specialisms are in early modern poetry and plays, with a particular interest in women’s writing, the uses of genre and the legacy of medieval English literary culture. Lately, my focus has turned to the role of sleep, dreaming, and domestic space, blending my interests in material culture, Renaissance horticulture, literary invention, and the gendered imagination. These ideas provide the foundation for my upcoming monograph on early modern women’s dream-vision poetry (circa 1586-1700) by authors from across the British Isles.

BA (Hons), MA, PhD – University of Birmingham

I was the first in my family to pursue higher education. I attended a local comprehensive school and a sixth-form college in the small Black Country town of Stourbridge before enrolling at the University of Birmingham as an undergraduate student in English Literature in 2005. After a lengthy hiatus from learning (and numerous different jobs in both private industry and the public sector) I made the step to go back into academia, with Birmingham as my instant choice. My AHRC-funded doctoral research (2012-16) produced the first full-length investigation into the sixteenth-century dream vision; a genre has always fascinated me, but which was believed to have died out with the medieval era. My research shows that this is a mode of expression which thrived well into the seventeenth century through the works of authors both prolific and, in many cases, marginalised or unknown. My aim in this thesis was to challenge prevailing theories about the dream-vision’s intellectual, aesthetic, and socio-political power, while also bringing to light poets who have been previously miscategorised or ignored.

Several projects spiralled out of this work, and I have had articles published in Modern Philology, Comparative Drama and The Journal of Early Modern Studies, spanning an array of topics, from the adaptation of Chaucer and Spenser in early modern plays and poems, to presentations of early modern tavern culture and Mary Queen of Scots in the works of the Staffordshire servant-poet Richard Robinson.

Lately, my focus has turned to the role of sleep, dreaming, and domestic space in the works of early modern women, blending my interests in material culture, Renaissance horticulture, literary invention, and the gendered imagination. These ideas provide the foundation for my upcoming monograph on early modern women’s dream-vision poetry (circa 1586-1700) by authors from across the British Isles.