Rate My Professor Sue Wiseman

Sue Wiseman is Professor of Seventeenth Century Literature in the School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication at Birkbeck, University of London. Her academic interests encompass Renaissance and seventeenth-century writing and culture, with particular emphasis on non-elite writing in seventeenth-century England, the places of the 'English Renaissance' such as elites and yeomen of Derbyshire and widows of Shoreditch, literature of change and transformation, women's writing, writing of the early seventeenth century, Civil War writing, writing on 'love', writing on London, captivity narratives, complaint, the literary and legal generation of the idea of the 'gypsy', wolf-transformation, wild children, and authors including Katherine Austen, John Donne, Elizabeth Delaval, Celia Fiennes, Mary Rowlandson, John Eliot, and Lodowick Muggleton. She serves as Principal Investigator (PI) on the 'Written Worlds' project, which explores non-elite writers in early modern England.

Professor Wiseman has authored and edited numerous influential works in her field. Key books include Writing Metamorphosis in the English Renaissance 1550-1700 (2014), Conspiracy and Virtue: Women, Writing, and Politics in Seventeenth Century England (2006), Drama and Politics in the English Civil War (1998), Aphra Behn (1996), and editorships such as Early Modern Women and the Poem (2013), Reading the Early Modern Dream: The Terrors of the Night (2007), and Women's Political Writings 1610-1725 (2007). Selected recent publications feature articles like 'Educating Shrews' (2023), 'Making ‘Gypsies’ in the English Reformation? Laws, words and texts (1530-1621)' (2022), 'Labour’s loves? Isabella Whitney, Leonard Wheatcroft and the love miscellany' (2019), and 'The Maid of Haddon: event, text and women in Derbyshire literate culture' (2018). She runs the London Renaissance Seminar and is Deputy Director of the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Worlds. Wiseman has extensive supervisory experience, having guided fifteen PhD students within Birkbeck, with many completing theses on topics including love elegy, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama and theatre, women's poetry of the Renaissance and seventeenth century, Civil War writing, and the psalms, thereby shaping the next generation of scholars in early modern literature.