Dr Peter Mitchell MA (Sussex), PhD (Wales), FRHistS

Contact Details

School of Cultural Studies
E-mail: p.mitchell@trinitysaintdavid.ac.uk

Campus

Lampeter Campus

Job Title

Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature

Role in the University

Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature

Background

Peter Mitchell’s research and scholarship fall within the fields of early modern literature (focusing on the works of John Donne and Phineas Fletcher) and the cultural and intellectual history, philosophy and theology of medicine, mind and body, particularly anatomy.

This research frequently relates to ontological or epistemological questions, issues of interpretation and representation, theory of metaphor and narrative, psychological and psychoanalytic theories, and modes of vision or analysis which unify that which has been dichotomized or otherwise divided. He aims to contribute to the theory and methodology of interdisciplinarity, particularly in relation to ideas of coherence, consistency, and congruity of disciplines, juxtapositions or opposed terms. Further particular and subsidiary interests lie in the dichotomy into art (culture) and nature, and that into classical and grotesque, the paradox of ingenuity and invention as both discovery and creation, the themes of creation, mortality and salvation, various aspects of subjectivity and self-knowledge, the topics of sexual difference, desire, appetite, sensuality, love, and temperance, the genres of allegory, lyric, and literary anatomy, and the subjects of bibliography and anatomical illustration and demonstration.

A current, long-term research project is entitled, ‘Bodies of Souls: Literary Anatomy and the Soul’s Description in Donne, Fletcher and Milton’. Early stages of this project have been supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship and a Wood Institute Fellowship with the Francis C. Wood Institute for the History of Medicine, College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

Academic Interests

Peter Mitchell is Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature and has a strong and continuing interest also in teaching medieval literature. In addition he has a professional interest in librarianship and bibliography, having been Librarian of the Centre for Marian Studies, Lampeter.  This has given rise to some applied research, including A Guide to Classification and Cataloguing in the CMS Library (2004), and to postgraduate teaching in bibliography, the library, and classification. Also at postgraduate level, Peter Mitchell co-ordinates the teaching of ‘Comparative Critical Approaches’, contributing seminars on metaphor, narrative, psychoanalysis, and subjectivity to this module.  At undergraduate level four, he teaches ‘Renaissance Lyric’, ‘Reading Medieval Texts’, and ‘Narrative’. At this level he also contributes a seminar on printed resources to ‘Study Skills for English’. At levels five and six, he teaches ‘Bodily Distempers and Passions of the Mind’ which focuses on work by Shakespeare and Donne; he co-teaches ‘Religion, Love and Politics: Sidney, Spenser, Milton’ and ‘Marvell to Pope’, and contributes lectures and seminars on Keats and Wordsworth to ‘Romantics’, and on Willa Cather to ‘Twentieth-Century American Literature: 1900-1950s’.

Publications

Authored Book

The Purple Island’ and Anatomy in Early Seventeenth-Century Literature, Philosophy and Theology (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007), 718 pp.

Edited Book / Special Edition of a Journal

The Nature and Culture of the Human Body: Lampeter Multidisciplinary Essays, ed. with an introduction (pp. xix-xxxii), Trivium, 37 (2007), 267 pp.

Articles and Chapters in Edited Books

‘The Politics of Morbidity: Plague Symbolism in Martyrdom and Medical Anatomy’, in The Arts of 17th-Century Science: Representations of the Natural World in European and North American Culture, ed. by Claire Jowitt and Diane Watt (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 77-94 

Refereed Articles in Academic Journals

‘Anatomy, Rationality and Scepticism: The Poetic Anatomies of John Davies of Hereford and Phineas Fletcher’, Zeitsprünge, Band 9 (2005), Heft 1 / 2: Zergliederungen – Anatomie und Wahrnehmung in der Fruhen Neuzeit, 224-51

‘Living Anatomy in Renaissance Culture’, in The Nature and Culture of the Human Body: Lampeter Multidisciplinary Essays, Trivium, 37 (2007), 21 pp.

Additional Information

Administrative Duties

Peter Mitchell is the English Department’s Library Officer and serves on both the Library Services Users’ Group as the Department’s representative, and the Special Collections Advisory Committee (Founders’ Library, Special Collections, Archives). He is also the Department’s Examinations Officer and Chair and Secretary of the Department of English Staff-Student Consultative Committee and he monitors student feedback and administers student questionnaires. He is also the Department’s Safety Officer.

Recent Unpublished Contributions to Conferences, Symposia, and Lecture/Seminar Series

(*national/international conferences)

‘Anatomy, Rationality and Scepticism: The Poetic Anatomies of John Davies of Hereford and Phineas Fletcher’, the Research Institute for Literature and Culture / Department of English Seminar Series, at the University of Wales, Lampeter, 18 March 2009

‘Figuring the Anatomy of the Human Heart in the English Renaissance: The “Ingenuity” of The Purple Island by Phineas Fletcher’, the Research Institute for Literature and Culture / Department of English Seminar Series, at the University of Wales, Lampeter, 5 December 2007

‘Living Anatomy in Renaissance Culture’, the Body Programme Open Lecture Series, 9 February 2004, and the Body Programme Autumn Residential, 28 October 2005, at the University of Wales, Lampeter; and by invitation in the Faculty History Network, Loughborough University, 5 December 2005

*‘Anatomy, Reason and Sense-Perception in Early Seventeenth-Century English Poetry and Natural Philosophy’, at the conference ‘Anatomie und Wahrnehmung in der Frühen Neuzeit’, Zentrum zur Erforschung der Frühen Neuzeit (ZFN), Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, 6-8 November, 2002

*‘The Anatomical Speaking Picture of The Purple Island (1633), by Phineas Fletcher’, at the Fifth International Literature and History Conference, University of Reading, entitled ‘Text and Image: England 1500-1750’, 10-12 July 2002

Recent Scholarships and Research Grants and Awards

2005-2006: Wood Institute Fellowship with the Francis C. Wood Institute for the History of Medicine, to enable research at the Historical Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia on ‘Robley Dunglison’s Dictionary of Medical Science: Standardisation of anatomical nomenclature and the modern elision of etymology’.

2004-2005: Leverhulme Research Fellowship with The Leverhulme Trust, to enable research on ‘Bodies of Souls in Seventeenth-Century Literature’, specifically in relation to biographical and bibliographical questions of the provenance and conceptual character of the anatomy in Phineas Fletcher’s The Purple Island (1633).

2004: British Academy Research Grant to aid the publication of ‘The Purple Island’ and Anatomy in Early Seventeenth-Century Literature, Philosophy and Theology.