Katie Mennis is a Junior Research Fellow in English. She has previously been a doctoral student and lecturer at Oxford. She works primarily on poetry in English and Latin across the period 1550-1750, with interests in translation, poetics, and the relationship between English and Latin literature. Her doctoral thesis, which she is developing into a book, was on English literature in Latin translation. It provides a literary history of the underexamined phenomenon of ‘Latinizing’ major English authors from Chaucer to Pope in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, placing emphases on the close textual encounters and tensions between Latin and English in these translations; the translators’ extraordinary lives; the temporality of Latinity and translation, and what Latinization can reveal about the changing confidence and anxieties of the ‘rising’ vernacular literary culture on the world stage. She has published on Spenser, Milton, and Shakespeare’s ‘bad’ love poems, and is also interested in George Gascoigne, Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, Christopher Smart, and Alice Oswald. At Christ’s, she is beginning a new project, tentatively titled ‘The Second Text’, which explores what she calls a poetics of secondariness – the tendency in early modernity for texts to position themselves as other, secondary, or supplementary to a primary sense – across the same broad period as her past research.
