Dr Jess Edwards
Dr Jess Edwards
(MA London, DPhil Sussex)
Tel: 0161 247 6167
E-mail: j.edwards@mmu.ac.uk
Room: 461 Geoffrey Manton Building, All Saints Campus
Research Specialisms
Cultural geography: literature, cartography and space. I’m interested in both the literary aspects of geography and the geographic aspects of literature. So far my research has predominantly been concerned with the early modern period when a recognisably ‘modern’, mathematical cartography first emerged. My first book dealt with seventeenth-century discourses on geometry, mapping and surveying, and I’m currently working on a new project exploring Daniel Defoe’s contributions to early eighteenth-century geographic culture. But I’m also interested in more recent travel writing, and plan to begin work on a book-length study of British domestic travel writing after I’ve completed my Defoe project.
Select Publications
Writing, Geometry and Space in Early Modern England and America: Circles in the Sand (London: Routledge, 2006).
Study, Marketplace and Labyrinth: Geometry as Rhetoric’, in New Formations 57 (Winter, 2005-6), pp. 126-44.
‘How to Read an Early Modern Map: Between the Particular and the General, the Material and the Abstract, Words and Mathematics’, trans. Herbert Wäckerlin, in Jurg Glauser and Christian Kiening (eds.), Text-Bild-Karte: Kartographien der Vormoderne (Freiburg: Rombach, 2005), pp.95-130.
‘Between ‘plaine wildernesse’ and ‘fine grain fields’: Representing Land Use in Early Virginia’, in Robert Applebaum and John Sweet (eds.), Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Invention of the North Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennslyvania Press, 2005), pp.217-235.
‘How to Read an Early Modern Map: Between the Particular and the General, the Material and the Abstract, Words and Mathematics’, Early Modern Literary Studies 9.1 (May, 2003), 6.1-58.
‘Points Mean Prizes: How Early Modern Mathematics Hedged its Bets between Idealism and the World’, in Claire Jowitt and Diane Watt (ed.s), The Arts of Seventeenth-Century Science: Representations of the Natural World in European and North American Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 43-57.
Forthcoming Publications
‘A Compass to Steer by: John Locke, Carolina and the Politics of Restoration Geography’, in Martin Brueckner (ed), Early American Cartographies, for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture by University of North Carolina, 8000 words, accepted after readers reports and revisions, will be published 2011.
‘Defoe the Geographer: Redefining the Wonderful’, in Judy Hayden (ed), Early Modern Literature and Science, Ashgate Press, 7,700 words, accepted after readers reports and revisions, will be published 2011.
‘Christopher Saxton’ and ‘John Norden’, in Garrett Sullivan and Alan Stewart, Encyclopaedia of English Renaissance Literature, Blackwell, 2000 words, accepted and will be published 2012.