Dr Huw Griffiths

Room N326 John Woolley Building, A20

+61 2 9351 2065


My research interests lie in sixteenth and seventeenth-century English literature and culture, with specific interests in: constructions of the early modern nation; rhetoric, politics and the body; violence in Shakespeare’s history plays; Shakespeare and Wales; representations of the ruin. Other interests include contemporary British poetry and contemporary gay fiction.

• Early Modern Literature and Culture
• Rhetoric

A Nation in Ruins: Text, Space and History in Early Modern England: a monograph that examines the ironies of history as available in representations of the ruin in poetry from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

I am currently writing an article on politics and instrumentality in Shakespeare’s King John, that will form part of a larger project on violence, rhetoric and the body in early modern drama, with a particular focus on Shakespeare’s history plays.

‘Shakespeare, Pathos and Sovereign Violence: 3 Henry VI and King Lear’ Rapt in Secret Studies: Emerging Shakespeares. Ed. L. Johnson. (forthcoming with Cambridge Scolars Press, 2009)

‘Listening to Welsh in Shakespeare and Armin’ Shakespeare and Wales. Eds. W. Maley and P. Schwyzer. (forthcoming with Ashgate 2008/2009)

‘The Sonnet in Ruins: Time and the Nation in 1599’ Early Modern Culture: An Electronic Seminar 6, Special Issue: ‘Timely Meditations’ (March 2007)

‘Letter Writing Lucrece: Shakespeare in the 1590s’ Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England Ed. Jennifer Richards and Alison Thorne. London: Routledge, 2006. 89-110.

‘The Geographies of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline’ English Literary Renaissance 34.3 (Autumn, 2004) 339-58.

‘Britain in Ruins: the Picts’ Wall and the Union of the two Crowns’ Rethinking History 7.1 (2003) 89-105.

‘Translated geographies: Spenser’s The Ruines of Time’ Early Modern Literary Studies 4.2 (September 1998) 7.1

Hamlet: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005.