Shannon Clinton-Copeland

Originally from London and raised in Ireland and then Kent, Shannon came to UEA in 2019 for her BA in English Literature with Creative Writing, which she completed in 2022. She completed her MA in Medieval and Early Modern Textual Cultures in 2023, also at UEA.

As well as pursuing academic research, she also works as a creative freelancer, writer and poet. Her creative work has been published by Bandit Fiction, Leslie Magazine and The Rialto, been commissioned by the National Centre for Writing and performed on BBC Radio Norfolk, at the digital Young Norfolk Arts Festival, on Norwich Theatre’s digital stage and at schools in and around Norwich and Norfolk. She has led writing workshops for Norwich Theatre Royal and the Young Norfolk Arts Trust, and sat on advisory and funding groups for Norwich Theatre and Norfolk Community Foundation respectively.

Shannon's current PhD research, funded by CHASE, focuses on depictions of and responses to the doctrine of Original Sin in early modern women's poetry. More broadly, her interests span the breadth of early modern religious writing, devotional and atomistic poetry and women's writing. Her work deals with conceptions of sin, salvation, grace, eschatology and epistemic distance in early modern English poetry.

Shannon is also interested in writing produced by Irish exilic communities on the continent between 1550 and 1680 in English, Irish and Latin, particuarly work by the Louvain Franciscans. She wrote her masters thesis on the intricacies of the construction of an early modern Irish history in the Annals of the Four Masters. She is also interested in Irish Catholic literary responses to the English Protestant occupation of Ireland in the 16th and 17th centuries.