Dr Alison Searle
- Position: Associate Professor of Textual Studies
- Areas of expertise: Renaissance drama, religious dissent, pastoral care, performance, scholarly editing, letters, co-general editor of Richard Baxter's letters for Oxford UP.
- Email: A.A.Searle@leeds.ac.uk
- Phone: +44(0)113 343 4743
- Location: 5.1.01 Cavendish Rd
- Website: ORCID
Profile
I joined the University of Leeds as a University Academic Fellow in Textual Studies and Digital Editing in September 2016. I was promoted to Associate Professor of Textual Studies in 2020. Prior to coming to Leeds, I was an ARC DECRA postdoctoral fellow at the University of Sydney (2012–2016), an AHRC Research Associate on the Complete Works of James Shirley at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge (2008–2012), and a Leverhulme Visiting Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London (2006).
Research interests
- pastoral care
- religious nonconformity and dissent
- Renaissance drama
- seventeenth-century epistolary culture
- transatlantic puritan literary traditions
- theories of the imagination
- literature and theology
Postgraduate supervision
I am happy to supervise postgraduate students in the following areas:
- early modern literature
- literature and religion
- textual studies and editing
- digital humanities
- epistolary culture and theory
Publications
Books
- Alison Searle, Pastoral Care through Letters in the British Atlantic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).
- Alison Searle and Johanna Harris, eds, The Puritan Literary Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024).
- Alison Searle, ‘The Eyes of Your Heart’: Literary and Theological Trajectories of Imagining Biblically (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2008).
Editions
- Alison Searle and Johanna Harris, gen. eds, The Correspondence of Richard Baxter, (Oxford University Press, forthcoming in nine volumes)
- Alison Searle and Jennifer Young, eds, The AHRC Electronic Old-spelling Edition of the Complete Works of James Shirley gen. eds, Eugene Giddens and Teresa Grant (London: King’s College, 2017).
Online Exhibitions
- The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel: A Transatlantic Community of Letters (2021).
- Baxter Quatercentenary Exhibition (2015).
Dataset
Radio Programmes
- ‘Archives in the Culture Wars’, contributor to BBC Radio 3 Sunday Feature with New Generation Thinker, Dr Tom Charlton, 6 June 2021.
- ‘The Life and Life of Richard Baxter’, contributor to BBC Radio 3 Sunday feature with New Generation Thinker, Dr Tom Charlton, 15 November 2015.
School Resource
‘How Texts From the Past Can Shape and Inform the Future’ (2021). Alison Searle was recently featured in a magazine and online article discussing her work and offering guidance to young people interested in textual studies. This article was produced by Futurum, a magazine and online platform aimed at inspiring young people to follow a career in social sciences, humanities and the arts for people and the economy (SHAPE). The article includes a link to an activity sheet for students and teachers.
Chapters in Scholarly Collections
- ‘Performing Pastoral Care through Letters’, eds, Johanna Harris and Alison Searle, The Puritan Literary Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024).
- ‘Compassion, Contingency and Conversion in James Shirley’s The Sisters’, eds, Kristine Steenbergh and Katherine Ibbett, Compassion in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Feeling and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
- ‘Bunyan and the Word’, ed., Michael Davies, A Handbook of Bunyan Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
- ‘Exiles at Home’, eds, Andrew Hiscock and Helen Wilcox, The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
- 'Performing Religious Nonconformity: Conversion, Debate and the Republic of Letters', eds, A. R. Cross, P. J. Morden & I. M. Randall, Pathways and Patterns in History (London: The Baptist Historical Society, 2015).
- ‘Ben Jonson and Religion’, ed., Eugene Giddens, A Handbook of Jonson Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
- ‘Women, Marriage and Agency in Restoration Dissent’, eds, Sarah Apetrei and Hannah Smith, Religion and Women in Britain, c. 1660–1760 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014).
- ‘Conversion, Incarnation, Performance: Theology and the Future of Imagination’, eds, David Starling and Trevor Cairney, Theology and the Future (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
- ‘Writing Authority in the Interregnum: The Pastoral Letters of Richard Baxter’, eds, Anne Dunan- Page and Clotilde Prunier, Debating the Faith: Religion and Letter-Writing in Great Britain, 1550–1800 (Springer: International Archives of the History of Ideas, 2013).
- ‘Conversion in James Shirley’s St Patrick for Ireland’, eds, Lieke Stelling, Harald Hendrix and Todd Richardson, The Turn of the Soul: Representations of Religious Conversion in Early Modern Art and Literature (Intersections: Yearbook for Early Modern Studies, Brill, Leiden, The Netherlands, 2012).
- ‘Narrative, Metaphor and Myth in C. S. Lewis’s testimonial novel Till We Have Faces’ in Oral and Written Narratives and Cultural Identities: Interdisciplinary Approaches, eds, F. C. Fagundes and M. F. Blayer (New York: Peter Lang, 2007).
- ‘Tolkien and Time: The Fantastic Art of Consolation, Endurance, Escape’, eds, Jan Lloyd et al., Art and Time (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2007).
Articles in Peer-Reviewed Journals
- (with Jo Sadgrove) ‘Organizational Identity and Decolonizing Care: Archives, Mission, and International Aid’, Misssion Studies, 42.1 (2025), pp. 6-30.
- (with Emily Vine) ‘We have sick souls when God’s physic works not’: Samuel Rutherford’s pastoral letters as a form of literary cure’, The Seventeeth Century, 37.6 (2022), pp. 913–36.
- (with Samantha Rayner) ‘C. S. Lewis: Writing and Publishing Literary Criticism with Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press’, Memoires du livre, 10.2 (2019).
- (with Tom Charlton) 'Manuscript and Print in the Late Seventeenth Century: The Case of Morgan Library, MA 4431, British Library, MS Egerton 2570, and Richard Baxter's An end of doctrinal controversies (1691)', The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society,19.3 (2018), pp. 368–375.
- '"a kind of agonie in my thoughts": writing puritan and non-conformist women's pain in 17th-century England', Medical Humanities 44.2 (2018).
- 'Interpreting the Event: Baptism, Networks and Polemic in Commonwealth England', The Seventeenth Century 33.5 (2018), pp. 513–29.
- ‘Letters: Emergence, Interaction, Transcendence’, Appositions: Studies in Renaissance/Early Modern Literature & Culture 1 (2008).
- “Though I am a stranger to you by face, yet in neere bonds by faith’: A Transatlantic Puritan Republic of Letters’, Early American Literature 43.2 (2008).
- ‘The Role of Missions in Things Fall Apart and Nervous Conditions’, Literature and Theology 21.1 (2007).
- ‘The Certainty of the Worlds of Spirits: Richard Baxter’s Prophetic Voice’, The Glass, 19 (2007).
- ‘Fantastical Fact, Home or Other? The Imagined ‘Medieval’ in C. S. Lewis’, Mythlore: A Journal of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature, 25.3–4 (2007).
- ‘The Moral Imagination: Biblical Imperatives, Narrative and Hermeneutics in Pride and Prejudice’, Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 59.1 (2006).
- ‘An Idolatrous Imagination? Biblical Theology and Romanticism in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre’, Christianity and Literature 56.1 (2006).
- ‘‘My Souls Anatomiste’: Richard Baxter, Katherine Gell and Letters of the Heart’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 12.2 (2006).
- ‘The Biblical and Imaginative ‘Interiority’ of Samuel Rutherford’, Dalhousie Review 85.2 (2005).
- ‘Theology, Genre and Romance in Richard Baxter and Harriet Beecher Stowe’, Religion and Literature 37.1 (2005).
- ‘Biblical Aesthetics and The Pilgrim’s Progress’, Journal of Literature and Aesthetics 14.2 (2004).
- ‘Which Model? Whose Measure?: Sexuality, Morality and Power in Measure for Measure and Basilicon Doron’, Philament 1.1 (2003).
Qualifications
- BA (Honours) in English Literature
- PhD in English Literature
- PGCE in Higher Education
Professional memberships
- Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
Research groups and institutes
- Textual Histories Research Group
- Centre for the Comparative History of Print