Paulina Kewes


Paulina Kewes is a Polish scholar of early modern literature, history and culture. She is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Helen Morag Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Jesus College.

Academic career

Kewes was born in Gdynia in 1964 and grew up in Sopot. Her Russian Jewish father Borys was a survivor of the Holocaust and died when Kewes was 16. She began studying at the University of Gdańsk in 1983, completing an MA thesis on Black American women writers of the late 20th century. While studying and later teaching at the university she worked as a freelance translator and interpreter. She was then awarded a Soros Visiting Scholarship to the University of Oxford in 1991, her research being supervised by John Carey. A year later she won a graduate scholarship at Jesus College to complete her DPhil on dramatic authorship and literary property in late seventeenth and early eighteenth century England, which she completed in 1996. Her doctoral supervisor was Harriett Hawkins and later Paul Hammond upon Hawkins' death.
In 1995 Kewes was elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at University College, Oxford and in 1997 joined the University of Wales, Aberystwyth as a Lecturer in English Literature. She was later promoted to Senior Lecturer before returning to Jesus College as Fellow and Tutor in English Literature in 2003. In September 2017 she was awarded the Title of Distinction of Professor of English Literature by the University of Oxford.

Research

Building on her doctoral thesis, Kewes' early publications focused on the themes of plagiarism, appropriation, translation, adaptation and biography in the long eighteenth century. Her first monograph, Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660-1710, was published by Clarendon Press in 1998. Her first edited volume, Plagiarism in Early Modern England, continued to explore such topics.
Kewes' chief research interests have since shifted to Elizabethan and early Stuart drama, particularly the genre's classical reception and historiography as well as the work of William Shakespeare. In 2020 she edited a special issue of Huntington Library Quarterly focused on the conceit of Ancient Rome in early modern English political culture. Edited volumes with Susan Doran in 2014 and Andrew McRae in 2019 have addressed the nature of the succession in Elizabethan and Stuart England. Kewes' historiographical interests were reflected in the edition of and handbook to Holinshed's Chronicles she produced, in collaboration with Ian Archer and Felicity Heal, for Oxford University Press in 2013.

Media work

In 2012 Kewes appeared in a podcast for History Extra discussing William Shakespeare's treatment of Richard III. In August 2015 Kewes appeared as a guest on BBC Radio 4's Great Lives series discussing Elizabeth I alongside Matthew Parris and Michael Howard.
In 2021, in celebration of the 450th anniversary of Jesus College, Kewes began assisting with the Jesus College Shakespeare Project. The project aims to stage one Shakespeare play per term until his entire dramatic canon has been performed. Schoolchildren are encouraged to attend performances and discuss the plays with the actors to widen access to Shakespeare and drama more generally. The project is expected to last until Hilary Term 2034.

Publications

Books

  • Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660-1710
  • Plagiarism in Early Modern England
  • The Uses of History in Early Modern England
  • The Oxford Handbook to Holinshed's Chronicles
  • Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England
  • ''Stuart Succession Literature: Moments and Transformations''

Journal articles

  • '"Give me the sociable Pocket-books": Humphrey Moseley's Serial Publication of Octavo Play Collections', Publishing History 38, pp. 5-21
  • 'Gerard Langbaine's View of Plagiaries: The Rhetoric of Dramatic Appropriation in the Restoration', The Review of English Studies 48, pp. 2-18
  • '"A Play, which I presume to call original": Appropriation, Creative Genius, and Eighteenth-Century Playwriting', Studies in the Literary Imagination 34, pp. 17-47
  • '"The State is out of Tune": Nicholas Rowe's Jane Shore and the Succession Crisis of 1713-1714', Huntington Library Quarterly 64, pp. 301-321
  • 'Julius Caesar in Jacobean England', The Seventeenth Century 17, pp. 155-186
  • 'Roman History and Early Stuart Drama: Thomas Heywood's The Rape of Lucrece, English Literary Renaissance 32, pp. 239-267
  • 'Henry Savile's Tacitus and the Politics of Roman History in Late Elizabethan England', Huntington Library Quarterly 74:4, pp. 515-551
  • '"A fit memoriall for the times to come...": Admonition and Topical Application in Mary Sidney's Antonius and Samuel Daniel's Cleopatra, The Review of English Studies 63, pp. 243-264
  • '"A Mere Historian": Patrick Collinson and the Study of Literature', History 100, pp. 609-625
  • '"I ask your voices and your suffrages": The Bogus Rome of Peele and Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus', The Review of Politics 78:4, pp. 551-570
  • 'The 1553 Succession Crisis Reconsidered', Historical Research 90, pp. 465-485
  • 'The State of Renaissance Studies: A World Well Lost?', English Literary Renaissance 50, pp. 76-82
  • 'Translations of State: Ancient Rome and Late Elizabethan Political Thought', Huntington Library Quarterly 83
  • 'Early Modern Parliamentary Studies: Overview and New Perspectives', History Compass 21,
  • in British Art Studies, 29,

Book chapters

  • 'Between the "Triumvirate of Wit" and the Bard: The English Dramatic Canon, 1660-1720', in Cedric Brown and Arthur F. Marotti, Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England, pp. 200-224
  • 'Shakespeare and New Drama', in David Womersley, A Companion to Literature from Milton to Blake, pp. 575-588
  • 'Dryden and the Staging of Popular Politics', in Paul Hammond and David Hopkins, John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays, pp. 57-91
  • 'Plays as Property, 1660-1710', in Alan Houston and Steven Pincus, A Nation Transformed: England After the Restoration, pp. 211-240
  • 'Otway, Lee and the Restoration History Play', in Susan J. Owen, A Companion to Restoration Drama, pp. 355-377
  • 'Shakespeare's Lives in Print, 1662-1821', in Robin Myers, Michael Harris and Giles Mandelbrote, Lives in Print: Biography and the Book Trade from the Middle Ages to the 21st Century, pp. 55-82
  • 'The Elizabethan History Play: A True Genre?', in Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard, A Companion to Shakespeare's Works, Volume II: The Histories, pp. 170-193
  • 'Dryden's Theatre and the Passion of Politics', in Steven Zwicker, The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden, pp. 129-153
  • 'Contemporary Europe in Elizabethan and Stuart Drama', in Andrew Hadfield and Paul Hammond, Shakespeare and Renaissance Europe, pp. 150-192
  • 'Jewish History and Christian Providence in Elizabethan England: The Contexts of Thomas Legge's Solymitana Clades , c.1579-88', in Allen Michie and Eric Buckley, Style: Essays on Renaissance Poetics and Culture, pp. 228-266
  • 'Greek and Roman Drama' and 'French Drama', in Peter France and Stuart Gillespie, The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, pp. 241-252 and 317-327
  • 'Acts of Oblivion, Acts of Remembrance: Rhetoric, Law, and National Memory in Early Restoration England', in Lorna Clymer, Ritual, Routine, and Regime: Institutions of Repetition in Euro-American Cultures, 1650-1832, pp. 103-131
  • 'Two Queens, One Inventory: The Lives of Mary and Elizabeth Tudor', in Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker, Writing Lives: Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representation in Early Modern England, pp. 187-207
  • 'Godly Queens: The Royal Iconographies of Mary and Elizabeth', in Anna Whitelock and Alice Hunt, Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth, pp. 47-62
  • 'The Exclusion Crisis of 1553 and the Elizabethan Succession', in Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman, Mary Tudor: New Perspectives, pp. 49-61
  • 'History Plays and the Royal Succession', in Ian Archer, Felicity Heal and Paulina Kewes, The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed's Chronicles, pp. 493-509
  • 'Marlowe, History, and Politics', in Emily Bartels and Emma Smith, Christopher Marlowe in Context, pp. 138-154
  • 'The Puritan, the Jesuit, and the Jacobean Succession', in Susan Doran and Paulina Kewes, Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England, pp. 47-70
  • 'Roman History, Essex, and Late Elizabethan Political Culture', in R. Malcolm Smuts, The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare, pp. 250-268
  • '"Ierusalem thou dydst promyse to buylde vp": Kingship, Counsel, and Early Elizabethan Drama', in Jacqueline Rose, The Politics of Counsel in England and Scotland, 1286-1707, pp. 171-192
  • 'Romans in the Mirror', in Harriet Archer and Andrew Hadfield, Mirror for Magistrates in Context: Literature, History and Politics Before the Age of Shakespeare, pp. 126-146
  • 'Parliament and the Principle of Elective Succession in Elizabethan England', in Paul Cavill and Alexandra Gajda, Writing the History of Parliament in Tudor and Early Stuart England, pp. 106-132
  • '"The Idol of State Innovators and Republicans": Robert Persons's A Conference About the Next Succession in Stuart England', in Paulina Kewes and Andrew McRae, Stuart Succession Literature: Moments and Transformations, pp. 149-185
  • 'The Final Years: England, Scotland and the Succession ', in Susan Doran, Elizabeth and Mary: Royal Cousins, Rival Queens, pp. 245-251
  • 'A Persian Mirror for English Magistrates: Thomas Preston's Cambises and the Coming to Terms with the Marian Past', in Krista Kesselring and Matthew Neufeld, Reckoning with History: Essays on the Uses of the Past, pp. 40-63.
  • 'Representative Assemblies in the Political Thought of Jean Bodin', in Gabriele Haug-Mortiz and Georg Vogeler, Digital Scholarly Edition and Pre-Modern Parliamentarianism: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Early Modern Sources
  • , "Joint Iconography for Joint Sovereigns: Mary Queen of Scots, James VI of Scotland, and the Campaign for Association, c. 1578–1584", in Yasmin Arshad and Chris Laoutaris, Women and Cultures of Portraiture in the British Literary Renaissance, ed. s, pp. 49–68.

Honours and awards

Kewes is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. In November 2020 she was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship to complete a three-year book project exploring the succession in Reformation England. She was also a co-investigator on the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Stuart Successions Project which in turn led to the development of the Stuarts Online web resource, also funded by the AHRC.
Between 2017 and 2022 Kewes was the Senior Member of the Oxford University Polish Society; she was the first woman to hold this position. She is currently a member of the editorial board of the journals Critical Survey and Postgraduate English.