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).
Responsibilities
- Unit of Assessment Lead (REF)
Research interests
- pastoral care
- religious nonconformity and dissent
- legacies of enslavement and decolonisation
- 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. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000wslk
- ‘The Life and Life of Richard Baxter, contributor to BBC Radio 3 Sunday feature with New Generation Thinker, Dr Tom Charlton, 15 November 2015: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06p4s60
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
- ‘Paradises Lost: Innocence and Excremental Whiteness in John Milton and James Baldwin’, Literature and Theology (2025). DOI: 10.1093/litthe/fraf017
- (with Jo Sadgrove) ‘Organizational Identity and Decolonizing Care: Archives, Mission, and International Aid’, Mission 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