Peter Auger

My research is about literature and mobility, that is, how the movement of people, books and ideas affects how people read and write. I study how early modern writers in England and Scotland draw on literary and linguistic resources associated with France, with a particular interest in how sociocultural factors affect writing and reading practices. My work is conscious of ‘English literature’ as a powerful category that shapes my research but does not reflect the historical diversity of multilingual literary practices in places where English is used.

At present I’m working on a monograph about Franco-British poetry during James VI and I’s reign. It uses a wider range of manuscript and print sources than the traditional focus on ‘French influence on English literature’ has usually invited, with case studies on poets writing in French to James, Esther Inglis, and William Drummond among others. I also have wider interests in the impact of Huguenot culture in Britain, and foreign-language publication in anglophone territories.

My research is increasingly informed by the analytical framework that critical and ethnographic sociolinguistic research offers for investigating complex and diverse writing and reading practices across time. I wrote a preliminary description of this style of ‘historical ethnographic’ research in the introduction to a volume called Multilingual Texts and Practices in Early Modern Europe (Routledge, 2023) that I co-edited with Sheldon Brammall. This grew out of an international symposium in 2019 on ‘Multilingual Practices in Early Modern Literary Culture’, which was funded by the AHRC Open World Project MEITS. This project developed in turn from the Early Modern Boundaries network (2015-17) that I set up using a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award.

These theoretical and methodological questions arose from my detailed empirical work on the reception history of James VI and I’s favourite poet, Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas (1544-90). My doctoral thesis and numerous shorter pieces supplied case studies that support the argument made in Du Bartas’ Legacy in England and Scotland (Oxford, 2019) that Du Bartas’ extraordinary renown led his works to provide a vital model for popular religious and epic verse to which Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Anne Bradstreet, John Milton, Lucy Hutchinson and many other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets writing in English responded. A highlight of my archival research for this project was re-discovering 800 verses from Du Bartas’ late poetry.

Please see my personal web-page for a full list of publications with links.

I went to school in Nottingham and Norwich, and then studied at Cambridge and Oxford. After lecturing at Exeter College, Oxford for several terms, I then held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Queen Mary University of London. I joined Birmingham in 2017. Like many early career researchers, I made many (in my case, over fifty) unsuccessful job and funding applications while on fixed-term contracts.