Abigail Williams

Dr Abigail Williams has been a Fellow at St Peter's since 2001, shortly after she finished her doctorate, which was on politics and literature in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, and in particular, the development of Whig literary culture in that period. She has just completed an edition of Jonathan Swift’s Journal to Stella for Cambridge University Press’s multi-volume Collected Works of Jonathan Swift. It came out in early 2013, along with four additional articles relating to the edition. As part of her detective work on the edition, she has become increasingly interested in Swift’s obliterations on his letters, and in the longer term, she would like to work on a more general study of literary obliteration.

The other major research project that she has been working on is the Digital Miscellanies Index, a 3 year Leverhulme-funded research project which will create a database of the contents of the 1000 or so poetic miscellanies published during the course of the eighteenth century. The database will be completed and launched by September 2013.

She also speaks in secondary schools about the history of reading, and in particular, the history of reading out aloud in the home, and is part of Robert Peston's Speakers for Schools programme.