Dr Sophie Read

Sophie Read is Senior Lecturer in the English Faculty, and a fellow and tutor at Christ’s, where she directs studies for Part II, and teaches Practical Criticism, Shakespeare, various Renaissance papers and Tragedy. She works primarily on seventeenth-century poetry, with a few excursions both backwards and forwards; she is interested in the intersection of literature and religion (theology, liturgy, the Bible), in literature and the senses, and in the shapes of rhetorical constructs. Her first book was Eucharist and the Poetic Imagination (Cambridge, 2013); a major edited collection, Western Literature and the Bible, Vol 2: The Renaissance, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2023. Her current monograph, provisionally entitled Speaking Sweet: Renaissance Rhetorics of Smell, is on perfume and the sense of smell in the early modern world. She has written on Shakespeare, Andrewes, Milton, Donne, Herbert, Herrick, Dryden and Swift at the early end of things; more recent subjects include W. S. Graham, Veronica Forrest Thomson, Michael Haslam, Ian Patterson, Denise Riley, Andrea Brady and Peter Manson. Sophie lives in Cambridge with her family and Pushkin the cat.