PHD GRADUATE

Dr Charlotte Newcombe

Thesis Title:

The Poetics of Matter and Form: Mid-Seventeenth-Century Women’s Poetry and Natural Philosophy

Supervisor(s):

Professor Kevin Killeen & Dr Namratha Rao

Description:

Charlotte Newcombe completed her PhD at the University of York in 2025, having previously also received her BA in English and MA in Renaissance Literature from the University of York.

Charlotte’s thesis, The Poetics of Matter and Form: Mid-Seventeenth-Century Women’s Poetry and Natural Philosophy, advances a new account of early modern women’s sophisticated engagement with natural philosophy, the study of nature. It examines how women drew differing poetic and natural philosophical theories into volatile collision to probe urgent physical, metaphysical, theological and political questions. In particular, her thesis focuses on the poetry of Anne Bradstreet, Lucy Hutchinson, Margaret Cavendish and Hester Pulter. Her doctoral research was funded by an AHRC studentship via the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities.

Charlotte has work published on The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making and forthcoming in a number of edited collections. She is currently writing the chapter on the quaternion poems for The Oxford Handbook of Anne Bradstreet.

Charlotte’s wider research interests include women’s writing, poetry and poetics, theories of form (new and old), materiality, and the intersections between literature and early modern intellectual culture more broadly.