Dr Hannah Crawforth

I am an Early Modernist with broad teaching and research interests in Anglo-American poetry from the sixteenth-century to the present. I have been at King's since 2009, when I received my PhD from Princeton University.

I am currently at work on two book projects. Tragic Political Thought: Milton and Modernity tells the story of two very different revolutionary moments in which Greek tragedy serves as a means for thinking the political. Juxtaposing the English Revolution of the seventeenth-century with the Haitian Revolution of the eighteenth, the book sets Milton's political writings alongside accounts of the life of Toussaint Louverture (by C.L.R. James, David Scott, and Toussaint himself) and offers a new account of the revolutionary power of Greek tragedy.

A second project charts the wide-ranging engagement with early modern texts by African-American poets writing today. Based upon a series of original interviews, along with readings of poems and early modern antecedents, the book explores what it means to reimagine the literary forms of a past that has often been the instrument of oppression and a site of trauma.

I have published books on Etymology and the Invention of English in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge, 2013) and the co-authored Shakespeare's London (Arden, Bloomsbury, 2015). With Elizabeth Scott-Baumann I have collaborated extensively on Shakespeare's Poems, co-editing a collection of essays (The Sonnets: State of Play) and commissioning poets to respond to the Sonnets (for the Shakespeare400 commemorations in 2016).

I am also the author of essays on poetry both modern and early modern, on writers including W.E.B. DuBois, Fulke Greville, Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, John Milton, Edmund Spenser, and Evie Shockley.

Research Interests

I am interested in supervising work in the following areas:

• Poetics, especially transhistorical topics
• Early Modern poetry
• Greek tragedy and its reception
• Shakespeare's Poems
• Anglo-American poetic dialogues

Teaching

I teach on a variety of modules and at all levels, from first-year core courses to PGT and PhD supervision. Topics include poetry, the reception of classical and other myths, Milton, Shakespeare (especially the poems), and Premodern Race and Gender. I sometimes convene the MA in Early Modern Literature, co-taught with the British Library.  

Expertise and Public Engagement

I have made numerous radio and television appearances, including, most recently, an episode of In Our Time on Shakespeare's Sonnets.

I was part of the steering committee for the Globe's latest Shakespeare and Race: Spoken Word(s) festival, held in November 2022.