Shrank, Cathy , Professor

About

My research focuses on early modern (or Renaissance) literature and culture (c.1500-1650), and the sixteenth century above all.I study a wide range of works across that period – in poetry, prose, and drama; manuscript and print – and look at very canonical writers (like Shakespeare) as well as extremely obscure ones. During the early modern period, there wasn’t such a distinction between fictional and non-fictional writing as there is today, and many of the texts that I’ve written on – political treatises, medical handbooks, language-learning dialogues - wouldn’t count as ‘literature’ today.My work sits at the intersection of History and Literature. I am interested in how texts are shaped by the context in which, and for which, they were written; how humanist education fashioned the style

Education

• PhD, University of Cambridge
• MPhil in Renaissance Literature, University of Cambridge
• BA (Hons) in English Literature, University of Cambridge

Selected publications

• Shrank C (2026) Dialogue in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, c. 1400-1680. Oxford University Press.
• Shrank C (2006) Writing the nation in Reformation England, 1530-1580. Oxford University Press on Demand.
• Shrank C () Dialogue in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, c. 1400-1680. Oxford University Press.
• Shrank C & Withington P (Ed.) (2023) The Oxford Handbook of Thomas More's Utopia. Oxford University Press.
• Pincombe M & Shrank C (Ed.) (2009) The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature:1485-1603. OUP Oxford.
• Cornish A, De Rycker K & Shrank C (2024) Introduction for special issue on precarity. English: Journal of the English Association, 73(282), 107-110. View this article in WRRO
• Shrank C (2019) Mirroring the “Long Reformation”: Translating Erasmus’ colloquies in early modern England. Reformation, 24(2), 59-75. View this article in WRRO
• Shrank C (2016) What I am Reading. Reformation, 21(2), 128-130.
• Shrank C & Pincombe M (2010) Doing Away with the Drab Age. Literature Compass.
• Shrank C (2009) Thomas Middleton, The Collected Works. European Journal of English Studies, 13(1), 110-112.