Dr Michael Davies
English
- +44 (0)151 794 2738
- Work email Michael.Davies1@liverpool.ac.uk
About
Personal Statement
I studied English as an undergraduate at Keble College, Oxford, and was awarded my PhD from the University of Leicester.
I teach early modern English literature across a range of periods, from the poetry, prose, and drama of the Renaissance to the works of Restoration and eighteenth-century authors as varied as John Bunyan and the Earl of Rochester, Jonathan Swift and William Cowper. I have also taught specialist courses in writing of the English Revolution (1630-60) and literature and the North of England (1840-the present).
Like my teaching, my research lies in the Renaissance and Restoration periods. Having worked on theology and narrative in the writings of John Bunyan, I now explore literature and religion in the seventeenth century more broadly, with an emphasis on Dissenting life and experience as well as early modern Protestant poetics and polemics.
My current research projects concern the writing of Dissent in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Calvinism in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, particularly Shakespeare, as well as the relationship between literature, religion, and politics in the Restoration, centring on the issue of 'liberty of conscience'. I am also interested in the English Revolution, and the writings of eighteenth-century authors of the Dissenting or Calvinist traditions - such as Daniel Defoe and William Cowper - as well as in John Bunyan's 'afterlife' in the twentieth century.
I would welcome postgraduate students (MA, MRes, or PhD) with interests in any of the following areas of research:
John Bunyan and writers of the 'Puritan'/Nonconformist or Dissenting tradition
Early Modern literature, religion, and politics (1550-1750)
Shakespeare
Renaissance poetry and drama
Restoration literature
Literature and the English Revolution
Literature and theology
My weekly Academic Support & Feedback Hours (semester 1, 2022-23) are on Monday 2-3pm and Tuesday 10-11am.