Dr Hannah Crawforth is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Literature in the English Department at King’s College London, where she has been since receiving her PhD from Princeton in 2009. She is a founding member of the London Shakespeare Centre. Her work centres largely on poetry and poetics, with a particular focus on historically-informed close reading, extending to the histories of individual words, literary forms and genres.
Her first monograph, Etymology and the Invention of English in Early Modern Literature, was published by Cambridge in 2013. The book considers the way that the birth of lexicography, linguistics and Anglo-Saxon studies suddenly opened up a new kind of allusivity for early modern writers, who began to draw upon the past lives of their words to underpin the famed wordplay of their work. It contains chapters on Spenser, Jonson, Donne and Milton.
She has also co-authored Shakespeare in London, published by Arden (Bloomsbury). Based on a course taught at King’s, the book takes readers on an imaginary journey through Shakespeare’s city, exploring connections between the language of his plays and the particular time and place in which they were written.
Hannah is writing a book on the early modern reception of Euripides.