Professor Philip Schwyzer

Philip Schwyzer is a specialist in early modern English literature, with interests including William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, and the literature of personal and cultural memory. Much of his research happens on borders and boundaries, including those between the Middle Ages and the early modern period, between literature and archaeology, and between England and Wales. His books include Shakespeare and the Remains of Richard III (2013), Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature (2007), and Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (2004).

He is Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded research project Inventor of Britain: The Complete Works of Humphrey Llwyd. Other recent projects include Deploying the Dead (DEEPDEAD), funded by HERA, and the Past in its Place Project, funded by the ERC. He is editing Michael Drayton’s great topographical and historical poem, Poly-Olbion, with Professor Andrew McRae, and was Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded Poly-Olbion Project.

I am a member of the AHRC Peer Review College, and am a former member of the Executive Committee for the International Spenser Society. In 2010, I organised the Shakespeare and Wales Symposium in Cardiff, and with my colleagues Dr Corinna Wagner and Dr Joanne Parker, I organised the conference 'Recasting the past: Early Modern to Postmodern Medievalisms' in 2011.

Future events associated with my current grants include a symposium on Death and Commemoration in November 2013, organized with Dr. Naomi Howell, and a conference on Place and Memory in 2015, co-sponsored by ECLIPSE. I am co-chair, with Prof. Karen Edwards, of the organizing committee for the International Milton Symposium, to take place at Exeter in July 2015.