Tom Lockwood

I came to Birmingham in 2005 from the universities of Cambridge and Leeds; I studied as an undergraduate and postgraduate at Girton College, Cambridge, and held a three-year British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Leeds.

My research explores the relationships between Renaissance writers and their later readers, and the material forms in which these and other textual exchanges take place. My first book, Ben Jonson in the Romantic Age (Oxford University Press, 2005), explores the many forms in which Jonson was mobile within the Romantic period. The book is part of my ongoing interest in the ways in which understandings of Renaissance writers and their texts have transformed by the history of their productions, publication and readership.

I delivered the Chatterton Lecture on English Poetry at the British Academy in October 2009, speaking on the title ‘Donne, By Hand’ (podcast of the lecture). I earlier spoke at the British Academy on ‘Milton in the Twentieth Century’ as part of a colloquium to celebrate the quatercentenary of Milton’s birth in December 2008, later published in John Milton: Life, Writing, Reputation. I have published widely on poetic and dramatic manuscripts from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries: I was awarded The Review of English Studies Essay Prize (2003) for my article, 'The Sheridans at Work', and my article reporting the text of a new country house poem, 'All Hayle to Hatfeild', was chosen for republication in the 40th Anniversary Virtual Issue of English Literary Renaissance. A new piece in The Review of English Studies announces ‘Another New Manuscript of Sir John Davies’s Epigrams’, and begins a conversation about the reasons why we might now need of a new edition of Davies’s Works.

My chapter on the poetry and career of one of Francis Bacon’s chaplains, William Lewis, formed part of a collection of essays published by Manchester University Press, Chaplains in Early Modern England, which I co-edited with Hugh Adlington and Gillian Wright; and I have explored Charles Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poets (1808) and Extracts from the Garrick Plays (1827). My article on William Hazlitt's reading and use of Lamb's Specimens was published in The Hazlitt Review (2014), and I wrote about Lamb's newly recovered copy of Ben Jonson in a piece comparing his responses to Jonson with those of John Thelwall, 'Jonson and the Friends of Liberty'.

My most recent piece explores 'Byron and Rochester'; and I am currently working on book chapters on Ben Jonson's poetry and on Dryden and Congreve, both for Oxford University Press.