Hazel Wilkinson

I am interested in eighteenth-century literature and print culture; the reception of early modern literature; book history (particularly typography); and digital humanities. 

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 is producing new research into ornamental type, to help us understand both what it meant to eighteenth-century readers, and how we can use it 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. 

I am currently co-editing (with Marcus Walsh) Alexander Pope’s Ethic Epistles, for The Oxford Edition of the Writings of Alexander Pope. I am also writing a book-length study of the Spectator’s influence on British literary culture in the long eighteenth century.

I am a Senior Lecturer in the English Department, specialising in eighteenth-century and early modern literature. 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 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 am Principal Investigator on the AHRC funded project 'Compositor: Recovering the Grammar of Ornament'. I am also a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute (2021–22).

I am on the Steering Committee of the Birmingham Eighteenth Century Centre, and I am a member of the Centre for Literary Editing and the Materiality of the Text.