Staff profile

Academic Bio

I joined Durham as Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies in September 2018, following stints as Research Associate on the ERC-funded project Crossroads of Knowledge: The Place of Literature in Early Modern England at the University of Cambridge (2014-2018), and Haslam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (2013-2014). Before that, I completed my PhD in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York.

Current Research Activities

Broadly, my research interests focus on the relationships between literature, natural philosophy (aka early 'science'), and theology in England, circa 1500-1700; I am particularly interested in the ways that literary texts represent knowing and knowledge as an embodied, passionate, and historically situated set of practices and experiences. 

My first monograph,Taste and Knowledge in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2020), investigates the relation between the physical sense of taste, and taste as a metaphorical term used to denote various forms of knowledge and judgement (including, but not only, aesthetic taste). In the early modern period, I argue, taste in both these 'senses' played a key role in the cultivation of humanist erudition, in the so-called ‘scientific revolution,’ in theological debates about how best to access divine truth, and in the experience and articulation of intersubjective knowledge and sexual desire. 

I'm now working on a second monograph, titled Error and Ecstasy: The Ends of Knowledge in Renaissance England. Focusing on the complex relations between humanist moral philosophy, Reformation theology, and experimental natural philosophy, this book explores how a range of authors (including Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, John Donne, Thomas Browne, Robert Boyle, and Margaret Cavendish) wrote about the 'ends' of knowledge in two senses: its purposes or aims, and its limits or boundaries. The first section investigates the origins of the aphorism 'knowledge is power', arguing that in the period, rather than conferring authority, the pursuit of knowledge was often bound up with experiences of vulnerability, debility, and abjection. The second section addresses the challenges and paradoxes of self-knowledge as a means to ethical self-betterment. The third section considers how, in the wake of the Reformation, a wide range of authors, thinkers, and experimental philosophers adapted and transformed the classical notion that one of the purposes of philosophy is to provide comfort and consolation in the face of misfortune and impending death.

I am also in the process of completing a short book, or 'minigraph', titled Knowledge and Power: A Polemical History, which grows out of the first section of my longer Error and Ecstasy monograph. This book explores the origins of the ‘knowledge is power’ aphorism in early modern England, but it also investigates the afterlife of the aphorism in Enlightenment philosophy and politics, in twentieth-century critical theory, and in modern popular, political, and educational cultures more generally. I show how the assertion that 'knowledge is power' has, historically, been deployed both in a spirit of empancipatory optimism, and in a spirit of cynical suspicion. In either case, I argue, the principle is frequently inadequate, inaccurate, and even destructive, and has contributed (amongst other things) to a growing climate of anti-intellectualism in the twenty-first century. 

Other research projects include co-editing (with Subha Mukherji) a volume titled 'Devices of Fancy': Literature and Scientia in Early Modern England, which will include a sole-authored introduction and an essay on Robert Boyle's experimental efforts to produce the chemical element we now know as phosphorus. I am also working on an article titled 'Shadows in the Water: Over-reading Thomas Traherne'. This piece offers a brief history of over-reading in the Renaissance that emphasizes both its entwinement with excess and error, and its theological and literary value as an intentional interpretive strategy.

I have a growing interest in the field of Critical University Studies, particularly the ways in which the kinds of knowledge produced in universities in the twenty-first century is shaped by the historical, cultural, socio-economic, and personal contexts of research and teaching. Some thoughts about this topic are available as a blogpost here. 

I welcome enquiries from postgraduate students with interests in intersections between literature, theology, and natural philosophy, and the senses and embodiment, in Renaissance England.

Other Research Activities

I am co-curator of an online exhibition hosted by the Fitzwilliam Museum, available here. This exhibition, titled Renaissance Spaces of Knowing: Privacy and Performance, explores the locations in which knowledge was generated, moving from public spaces including the marketplace, the law-courts, the theatre, the church, and the schoolroom, to private and quasi-private spaces including the garden, the study, and the bedroom. 

Authored book

• Swann, E. L. (2020). Taste and Knowledge in Early Modern England. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108767576

Book review

• Swann, E. L. (2021). Review of /Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern English Kitchen/, by Wendy Wall
• Swann, E. (2018). Review of /From Gluttony to Enlightenment: The World of Taste in Early Modern Europe/ by Viktoria von Hoffmann. French Studies, 72(1), 113-14
• Swann, E. L. (2018). Review of /Sociable Knowledge: Natural History and the Nation in Early Modern Britain/ by Elizabeth Yale. English Studies, 99(2), 219-20
• Swann, E. L. (2016). Review of /Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture/, ed. Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhuis. Renaissance Studies, 30(3), 474-77
• Swann, E. L. (2014). Review of /Sense and the Senses in Early Modern Art and Cultural Practice/, ed. Alice E. Sanger and Siv Tove Kulbrandstand Walker. Journal of the Northern Renaissance, 6,

Chapter in book

• Swann, E. L. (2020). ‘Sweet above compare’? Disputing about taste in Venus and Adonis, Love's Labour's Lost, Othello, and Troilus and Cressida. In S. (. Smith (Ed.), Shakespeare / sense (85-109). Bloomsbury. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474273268.ch-004
• Swann, E. L. (2018). 'To dream to eat Books': Bibliophagy, Bees, and Literary Taste in Early Modern Commonplace Culture. In J. Scott-Warren, & A. Zurcher (Eds.), Text, food, and the early modern reader : eating words (69-88). Routledge
• Swann, E. L. (2018). God's Nostrils: The Divine Senses in Early Modern England. In R. Macdonald, E. K. Murphy, & E. L. Swann (Eds.), Sensing the sacred in medieval and early modern culture (220-244). Routledge
• Swann, E. L. (2018). Nosce Teipsum: The Senses of Self-Knowledge in Early Modern England. In S. Mukherji, & T. Stuart-Buttle (Eds.), Literature, belief and knowledge in early modern England : knowing Faith (195-214). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71359-5_9

Edited book

• Swann, E. L., Macdonald, R., & Murphy, E. K. (Eds.). (2018). Sensing the Sacred in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Routledge

Other (Digital/Visual Media)

• Swann, E. L., Mukherji, S., & Suthren, C. (2019). Renaissance Spaces of Knowing: Privacy and Performance. [[Media unknown]]

Presentation

• Swann, E. L. (2013, December). Dulce et utile: Diagnosis, Dietetics, and Taste in Early Modern Poetics. Paper presented at Reading and Health in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800, Newcastle University
• Swann, E. L. (2018, December). Nothing Clearer, Nothing Darker: Robert Boyle’s 'Glimmerings of Light'. Paper presented at Ordering Knowledge from Bacon to the Shelleys, University of Strasbourg
• Swann, E. L. (2012, December). The 'tast of science': Natural Philosophy and Taste in Seventeenth-Century England. Paper presented at Society for Renaissance Studies Biennial Conference, University of Manchester
• Swann, E. L. (2010, December). ‘Question your teaspoons': Cutlery and Consumption in Seventeenth-Century England. Paper presented at Making Publics Summer Symposium, McGill University, Montreal
• Swann, E. L. (2015, December). Writing New Histories of Embodiment (seminar paper). Paper presented at Annual Meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, Vancouver
• Swann, E. L. (2015, December). Vulnerable Knowledge in Early Modern England. Paper presented at Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies Seminar, University of York
• Swann, E. L. (2014, December). The Subject of Allegory: Sensation and Subjectivity on the Late Medieval and Early Modern Stage. Paper presented at International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo
• Swann, E. L. (2014, December). 'Readyng is the best medicine': Literary and Therapeutic Taste in Early Modern Miscellanies. Paper presented at Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, New York
• Swann, E. L. (2016, December). Nosce Te Ipsum: Early Modern Senses of Self-Knowledge. Paper presented at Society for Renaissance Studies Biennial Conference, University of Glasgow
• Swann, E. L. (2019, December). Shadows in the Water: Over-reading Thomas Traherne. Paper presented at Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Toronto
• Swann, E. L. (2016, December). God’s Nostrils: The Divine Senses in Early Modern England. Paper presented at Early Modern Seminar, Durham University
• Swann, E. L. (2019, December). Robert Boyle’s 'Abstruse Phaenomina': From Philosopher’s Stone to Phosphorus. Paper presented at Secrecy and Openness in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, New York University
• Swann, E. L. (2011, December). ‘Imitation Sweet': Early Seventeenth-Century Commonplace Culture and the Bibliophagic Trope. Paper presented at Eating Words: Text, Image, Food, University of Cambridge
• Swann, E. L. (2018, December). 'Those Fruits of Natural Knowledge': Rhetorical and Experimental Taste. Paper presented at Subjective Sciences: A Workshop on Taste and Connoisseurship in Early Modern Europe, University College London
• Swann, E. L. (2013, December). 'A Taste of Spirituall Things': Spirituality and Sweetness in Early Modern Devotional Literature. Paper presented at Sensing the Sacred: Religion and the Senses, 1300-1800, University of York
• Swann, E. L. (2015, December). Erotic Epistemologies in Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems. Paper presented at nnual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Berlin
• Swann, E. L. (2016, December). Hazarding All: Risk and Knowledge in Early Modern England. Paper presented at Scientiae: Disciplines of Knowing in the Early Modern World, University of Oxford
• Swann, E. L. (2011, December). ‘Loves sensuall Emperie': Erotic and Epistemic Taste in Ovids Banquet of Sense. Paper presented at The Senses in Early Modern England, 1485-1668, Shakespeare’s Globe and Birkbeck, University of London
• Swann, E. L. (2015, December). The Meaning of Making: Self-Experiment and Knowledge, circa 1660-1730 B. Paper presented at ritish Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Annual Conference, University of Oxford
• Swann, E. L. (2020, December). 'A straine above mortality': The Ends of Knowledge in Early Modern England. Paper presented at Interdisciplinary Renaissance and Early Modern Seminar, University of Leeds
• Swann, E. L. (2014, December). 'Knowledge is Power'? Epistemology and Vulnerability in Early Modern England. Paper presented at Reading Early Modern Studies Conference, University of Reading
• Swann, E. L. (2016, December). The Consolations of (Natural) Philosophy: Knowing Death in the Early Royal Society. Paper presented at London Renaissance Seminar, Birkbeck, University of London
• Swann, E. L. (2013, December). Bitter Sin, Salvific Sweetness: Piety and Palate in Early Seventeenth-Century Devotional Literature. Paper presented at The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures, University of Bern
• Swann, E. L. (2013, December). The “Palate of the Understanding”: Taste and Knowledge in Early Modern Culture. Paper presented at Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies Research Seminar, University of Kent