Elaine Hobby first encountered Aphra Behn’s writings in 1979, when she began work on her PhD. After a lifetime of editing works by other early-modern writers and analysing women’s texts from the period, she is delighted now to be dedicating every waking moment to the fascination of Behn’s oeuvre. She is Professor Emerita of Seventeenth-Century Studies at Loughborough University, where she has worked (mostly with glee) since 1988.
Gillian Wright is Professor of English and Irish Literature at the University of Birmingham. Her publications include Producing Women’s Poetry, 1600-1730: Text and Paratext, Manuscript and Print (Cambridge University Press, 2013); Katherine Philips: Form, Reception and Literary Contexts (Routledge, 2018), co-edited with Marie-Louise Coolahan); and Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry (Manchester University Press, 2005), co-edited with Jill Seal Millman. She is amazed at the number of people in the world who still haven’t heard of Aphra Behn, and enjoys helping to change this situation for the better
Mel Evans is a lecturer in English Language with Digital at the University of Leeds. Her research interests span the early-modern period, and explore the intersection between language, identity and diachronic change in literary and non-literary texts. She has published on royal correspondence, corpus linguistics and authorial style and attribution, including Royal Voices: language and power in Tudor England (CUP, 2020). For E-ABIDA, Mel is developing computational linguistic methods and materials to investigate the authorship of works of dubious origin. As well as offering a new perspective on Behn dubia, their work will enrich our understanding of the literary styles of Behn and her Restoration contemporaries. Mel is also editing Behn’s correspondence for volume VIII of The Cambridge Works of Aphra Behn. This includes letters sent during Behn’s time as a spy in Antwerp in the mid-1660s, and will allow Mel to spend some time rummaging in the archives
Claire Bowditch thought that she knew Aphra Behn when, in 2015, she completed her PhD on Behn’s plays and their French and English sources. She was quite wrong. With Elaine Hobby, she is co-editing volume II of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Aphra Behn, for which she is also one of the General Editors; as a direct result, her current obsessions include collation, Cheapside, the Inns of Court, and ailments commonly affecting horses in 1678.
Alan Hogarth was a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the Editing Aphra Behn in the Digital Age (E-ABIDA) project between 2017 and 2020. He worked on questions of authorship in relation to Behn’s writing, using computational methods. Alan also has research interests in early-modern Natural Philosophy, the language of the Royal Society, John Donne, and the intersections of literary and scientific writing in English Renaissance literature.
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