Dr Daniel Starza Smith

After several years working as a travel journalist for Time Out, I realised that my true calling lay in the manuscripts room of the British Library, where I became obsessed first with an anonymous Stuart play fragment, then the sprawling, messy Conway Papers archive, which contained poetry by John Donne. Before coming to King’s I taught at the University of Reading and UCL, before taking up a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Lincoln College, Oxford, focusing on Donne’s women patrons. I have worked on the landmark Donne Variorum, the ‘Signed, Sealed, & Undelivered’ project (http://brienne.org/), and, with Jana Dambrogio of MIT Libraries, have developed the field of ‘letterlocking’, the study of epistolary security before the invention of the envelope. In 2021, we x-rayed and virtually unfolded an unopened letter from the 1690s without breaking its seal – a world first. In the coming years I will be focusing on Donne again, as General Editor of his Correspondence for OUP. I would be especially interested to work with students on aspects of his writing, texts, biography, and intellectual world.

Research interests and PhD supervision

• John Donne’s life and works, particularly his patrons and friends, and the circulation of his writing in manuscript
• The literary and material features of early modern letters
• The history of manuscripts, printed books, libraries, and archives in early modern England and Europe
• Women’s writing and patronage activities
• Editorial theory and practice

Teaching

I contribute to the teaching of early modern literature across all undergraduate years, as well as on Master’s courses, where I also teach graduate research methods.

Expertise and public engagement

With the Unlocking History research group, I have led letterlocking workshops in archives and libraries, reaching conservation staff, scholars, and the general public; I have also consulted for The National Archives and British Library. My reviews of academic books and theatre performances have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Review of English Studies, John Donne Journal, Library and Information History, English Studies, and Shakespeare. The work of the letterlocking project has been covered by more than 300 media outlets around the world, click here to see more.

Selected publications

John Donne and the Conway Papers (OUP, 2014)

Manuscript Misellanies in Early Modern England, co-edited with Joshua Eckhardt (Routledge, 2014)

Letterlocking, co-authored with Jana Dambrogio (MIT Press, 2024)

'Unlocking history through automated virtual unfolding of sealed documents imaged by X-ray microtomography' Nature Communications

'Rediscovering John Donne’s Catalogus librorum satyricus', Review of English Studies