About Us

Principal Investigators

Dr. Anne James is an Assistant Professor in English at the University of Regina. She researches in the areas of early modern sermons, particularly on political occasions, and the work of John Donne. She is the author of Poets, Players, and Preachers: Remembering the Gunpowder Plot in Seventeenth-Century England (University of Toronto Press, 2016).

Dr. Brent Nelson is a Professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan. Most of his research is at the intersection of the digital humanities and early modern literature and culture. He is Director of the John Donne Society’s Digital Prose Project and principal investigator on a project on early modern cabinets of curiosities.

Dr. Jeanne Shami is a Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Regina. She has had an interest in John Donne, in particular, and early modern sermons more generally for over 40 years. This work with GEMMS brings together her love of archival research and sermon scholarship. Her article on "The Sermon" appeared in The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern English Literature and Religion (OUP, 2017), and she was General Editor of Commentary for the Verse Letters volume of The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne (Indiana UP, 2019). She also is a Contributing Editor to the OUP edition of the prose letters of John Donne.

Project Collaborator

Dr. Matt Milner is an Adjunct Professor of History at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. He is a specialist of late medieval and early modern English religious life, and its intersections with medicine and philosophy through contemporary cultures of the senses and theories of perception. He examined these intersections in The Senses and the English Reformation (Routledge, 2011). Milner also is a digital historian and the PI of the SSHRC-funded ‘Nanohistory: an experimental digital history methodology’, which is testing his prototype digital history platform, www.nanohistory.org. Nanohistory.org permits scholars to document complex historical events or phenomena as networks of interweaving and overlapping discourse surrounding what historical actors did in the past. He is working with GEMMS on modelling sermons as historical events, and to assist in understanding how accounts of sermons, sermon manuscripts, and published sermons interrelate as performances, discourse, and happenings.

Past Collaborator & Database Designer

Dr. Jon Bath is an Associate Professor of Art and Art History, and a co-Director of the Digital Research Centre at the University of Saskatchewan. He teaches electronic art, digital humanities, and the book arts. He is the Principal Investigator for the SSHRC-funded Post-Digital Book Arts project and was the co-lead of the Modeling and Prototyping Team of Implementing New Knowledge Environments (inke.ca). He has co-authored chapters for the Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book (2015), Doing Digital Humanities (Routledge, 2016) and The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities (2018), and co-edited Feminist War Games: Mechanisms of War, Feminist Values, and Interventional Games (Routledge, 2019).

Project Manager

Dr. Jennifer Farooq is a Research Associate at the University of Regina. Her primary interests include preaching, the publishing and reception of sermons, and religious culture in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain. She is the author of Preaching in Eighteenth-Century London (Boydell, 2013) and has published a number of articles on sermons and religious culture in England, including “Dissenters and Charity Sermons, ca. 1700-1750,” in Protestant Dissent and Philanthropy, c. 1660-c. 1920 (Boydell, 2019).

Research Assistants

Kyle Dase is a doctoral candidate in the University of Saskatchewan's department of English whose research includes digital humanities, textual editing, and late medieval and early modern literature. In addition to working on the GEMMS project, he is a research assistant on The Canterbury Tales project and the Social Network of Early Modern Collectors of Curiosities. His Disseration, "Donne's Second Religion: Social Context in the Verse Letters of John Donne," examines the intersections of Donne's familiar and patronage epistles with select classical and material social contexts.

Dr. Catherine Evans was awarded her PhD from the University of Sheffield in Spring 2019 for a thesis entitled "Materialising Time in early modern Religious Literature". Her doctoral work was funded by the AHRC and she is currently developing this project into a monograph. Since finishing her PhD she has taken up fellowships at the John Rylands, Huntington and Clark Libraries looking at marginalia in printed sermons for evidence of reading practices. From December 2019 she will be based at the University of Edinburgh, working on Anne, Lady Halkett's manuscript meditations. In May 2020 she is co-organising a two day conference exploring the connections between theatrical and non-theatrical texts in early modern England, Pulpit, Playhouse and Page. She has forthcoming publications on women's psalm translations and George Herbert's Outlandish Proverbs.

Dr. Adam Richter received his PhD in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Toronto. He is currently a sessional instructor at the University of Toronto Mississauga. His main research interest is the relationship between science and religion in early modern Europe. At the moment, he is researching the impact of anti-Catholic prejudice on early modern English science.

Dr. David Robinson recently completed his PhD in History at the University of Toronto. His dissertation examines how religious disputations dramatized religious controversy for lay audiences in early seventeenth-century France, England, and the Netherlands. He has recently published a chapter on this subject, “Religious Disputations as Theatre: Staging Religious Difference in France after the Wars of Religion” in Reframing Reformation: Understanding Religious Difference in Early Modern Europe (Toronto: CRRS, 2019). More broadly, David is interested in the history of religious co-existence, the history of communication, and the early modern Atlantic World.

Hannah Kirby Wood is a doctoral Candidate in Medieval History at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto. Her dissertation, entitled "Intersections of Voluntary and Involuntary Poverty in Late Medieval England," explores the discursive and tangible interactions between the English mendicant orders and the lay poor.

Hannah Yip recently completed her PhD at the University of Birmingham. Her doctoral thesis, under the supervision of Dr. Hugh Adlington and Dr. Tara Hamling, is entitled ‘Visual Elements of English Printed Sermons, c. 1540 – c. 1660: Reading, Religious Politics, and Iconography’. She is the author of an article which examines printed images in the early modern English funeral sermon in the edited collection What is an Image in Medieval and Early Modern England?, eds. Antoinina Bevan Zlatar and Olga Timofeeva  (Tübingen: Narr, 2017) and recently published an article entitled "What is a Homily in Post-Reformation England?" in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History.  She has also held an AHRC-Huntington Fellowship.

Past Research Assistants

Lucy Busfield, University of Oxford, Research Assistant 2015-17.

Benjamin Durham, University of Toronto, Iter fellow 2015-16.

Robert Imes, University of Saskatchewan, Research Assistant 2015-19.

Brandon Taylor, University of Toronto, Iter fellow 2018-19.

Advisory Board

Professor Kenneth Fincham, Professor of Early Modern History, University of Kent, UK.

Dr. Arnold Hunt, Lecturer in History, University of Cambridge, UK.

Dr. Mary Morrissey, Associate Professor in English Literature, University of Reading, UK.

Dr. Richard Snoddy, Associate Research Fellow and Visiting Lecturer in Theology, London School of Theology, UK.

Dr. Sebastiaan Verwij, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Bristol, UK.