Peter Auger

My research examines cultural mobility and diversity in early modern Europe, challenging fixed ideas of national literatures like English. I study the movement of people, books, and ideas across the English Channel in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, often writing about poetry and with a particular interest in how sociocultural factors affect reading and writing practices. The wider societal value of my research, as I see it, is to meet the social, cultural and economic need for greater intercultural awareness and sensitivity to cultural and linguistic diversity in English-speaking countries.

At present I’m working on a monograph, provisionally entitled Cultural Mobility and Power in Jacobean Literature, that moves past older work on the ‘French influence on English Literature’ to demonstrate how early modern writers in England and Scotland engaged with literary and linguistic resources associated with France in ways that were multilingual, multilateral and socially stratified.

I am also leading a project, co-led by Suzanne Jones (Cambridge) and funded by the Leverhulme Trust, that studies French-language print publications in England from 1470 to 1685. We are creating an open-access database of over five hundred books, establishing a computer-assisted transcription process to address the monolingual bias of the widely-used EEBO-TCP corpus, producing a book-length reader on diverse English cultural practices using French, and promoting academic engagement with the Huguenot Library’s valuable collections. Overall, the project aims to develop digital, quantitative, and qualitative methods to open up foreign-language publication as an interdisciplinary area of study.

My research is informed by the analytical framework that critical and ethnographic sociolinguistic research offers for investigating complex and diverse writing and reading practices across time. I wrote a preliminary description of this style of ‘historical ethnographic’ research in the introduction to a volume called Multilingual Texts and Practices in Early Modern Europe (Routledge, 2023) that I co-edited with Sheldon Brammall. This grew out of an international symposium in 2019 on ‘Multilingual Practices in Early Modern Literary Culture’, which was funded by the AHRC Open World Project MEITS. This project developed in turn from the Early Modern Boundaries network (2015-17) that I set up using a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award.

These theoretical and methodological questions arose from my detailed work on the reception history of James VI and I’s favourite poet, Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas (1544-90). My doctoral thesis and numerous shorter pieces supplied case studies that support the argument made in Du Bartas’ Legacy in England and Scotland (Oxford, 2019) that Du Bartas’ extraordinary renown led his works to provide a vital model for popular religious and epic verse to which Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Anne Bradstreet, John Milton, Lucy Hutchinson and many other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets writing in English responded. A highlight of my archival research for this project was re-discovering 800 verses from Du Bartas’ late poetry.

I have been co-director of Birmingham's Centre for Reformation and Early Modern Studies (2024-6) and currently co-direct our new Early Modern Research Centre (2026-present)

Please see my personal web-page for a full list of publications with links.

I went to school in Nottingham and Norwich, and then studied at Cambridge and Oxford. After lecturing at Exeter College, Oxford for several terms, I then held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Queen Mary University of London. I joined Birmingham in 2017 and have taken shared parental leave twice in recent years to care for my young children.