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 she is also interested in George Gascoigne, Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Christopher Smart, William Cowper and Alice Oswald.
At Christ’s, she is working on a number of topics, including Latin and early romanticism, and King James VI/I's arguably 'bad' poem Lepanto, and she is coordinating celebrations for the 350th anniversary of John Milton's death. She is at the early stages of researching two book-length projects: one on 'artificial' or 'mechanical' versification from Spenser to Wordsworth, and a creative biography project on the poet, translator and convicted coin filer Usher Gahagan.
