Sophie Butler

I came to UEA in 2017 from the University of Oxford, where I had spent over a decade as first an undergraduate and postgraduate student and then as a fixed-term lecturer. 

I am originally from a small village just outside the Cathedral City of Lichfield in Staffordshire, and I had a somewhat unusual educational journey towards university. I became ill with M.E. in my early teens, which meant that I had to leave my state secondary school and be tutored at home for my GCSEs. I then returned to school for sixth form – this time to a small all-girls’ boarding and day school – meaning that I ended up experiencing a range of learning environments. All of these, in varied ways, helped to prepare me for different aspects of university life both as a student and as a tutor.

Since arriving at UEA I have led and taught on a wide range of modules within the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, especially in the area of pre-1789 literature. In 2021 I established the final-year module ‘Women’s Writing in Early Modern Britain’, which I teach and convene, and I also currently convene the second-year ‘Shakespeare’ module. I contribute lectures to modules including ‘Early Modern Writing 1600-1740: The Making of English Literature’ and ‘English Literature: Beginnings’. I am also interested in the relationship between creative and critical writing and for several years I taught the creative-critical module ‘Reading and Writing in Elizabethan England’. I have supervised many undergraduate dissertations, including recently on topics such as early-modern women’s life-writing, Andrew Marvell’s poetry, and Renaissance drama. I am always happy to hear from students interested in pursuing an early-modern related topic for their dissertation.

At postgraduate level I taught the MA module ‘The Northern Renaissance’ for several years and have supervised multiple MA dissertations on topics including Montaigne’s essays, Anne Clifford’s life-writings, and manuscript letter collections. 

At doctoral level, I have supervised PhDs on topics ranging from the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century editorial history of Paradise Lost to Shakespeare and BBC radio drama. With colleagues at UEA and the University of Kent I have also co-run the CHASE-funded 'Bookscapes' book history training programme for doctoral students for the past several years. 

I am a member of the Medieval and Early-Modern Research Group within LDC.

I work extensively with archives and libraries, both in my individual research and in my broader collaborative projects working with libraries and heritage organisations such as Norfolk Public Libraries and National Trust.

My primary research focuses on the development of the essay genre in early modern England, and on the ways in which the literary form of the essay is shaped by material forms of reading and writing, intersecting with transformations in humanistic culture and the development of life-writing across the period. Specifically, I am interested in the development of the early-modern essay form and its relationship to material and conceptual ideas of the ‘draft’, and I delivered a keynote lecture on this topic at the conference ‘Literary Form After Matter, 1500-1700’ at Oxford in 2018. I have a chapter based partly on this lecture in the forthcoming EUP edited collection emerging from this project (due to be published 2026). My interest in the early-modern English essay has also led me to work on the early English reception of the French essayist Montaigne, and to the broader area of early-modern life-writing and autobiography.  

I am also particularly interested in women as writers, readers, and patrons in the early-modern period, and have presented conference papers on early-modern noblewomen as patrons of English essays, with a particular focus on Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford and her familial networks. I am bringing together my interests in women's writing and life writing in an ongoing side project to edit a manuscript diary written by Mary Woodforde (a member of the prolific family of diarists who include, most famously, Parson James Woodforde) in the late 1680s and 1690s.

I have extensive experience in impact generation and public heritage projects in connection to historic libraries, and in developing and leading collaborations with GLAM-sector partners. For several years, I have co-run UEA’s Unlocking the Archive project with Tom Roebuck, and through this have worked extensively with Norfolk Libraries and Information Service (at Norfolk Heritage Centre and King's Lynn Public Library) and National Trust (originally at Blickling Estate) to find new ways to open up their historic book collections to the public. This work contributed towards a successful Impact Case Study for UEA’s School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing in REF2021. As part of this, we created new forms of digital access to items held by our partner institutions through our innovative online resource ‘Discover Historic Books’, which is free to explore. 

As part of my public heritage work, I frequently collaborate with artists, graphic designers and other creative practitioners on projects based around libraries and historic book collections, bringing together archival research into book history with multi-media interpretation. With Tom Roebuck, I am currently leading a project in this area in partnership with National Trust's Belton House in Lincolnshire, funded by an AHRC Impact Accelerator Award (due for completion in 2026), for which we are also working with Grantham Arts, a community-based arts organisation.

I also recently led 'Make Your Mark!' with Tom Roebuck and Norwich-based graphic designer Darren Leader: a series of public workshops and events based around Norwich merchants’ marks and archival materials created by the early-modern antiquarian John Kirkpatrick, which culminated in a community-based exhibition at National Centre for Writing in November 2024. This was funded by the AHRC as part of the Being Human Festival 2024, and run in partnership with Norfolk Heritage Centre, National Centre for Writing and Norfolk Museums Service. This project built on long-standing collaborations with Leader, including the 2017 project and exhibition ‘New Impressions: Redesigning Norwich’s Renaissance Books’ and our award-winning commercial zine Logo Redux (BP&O, 2021), based around Renaissance printers’ marks. Most recently, Roebuck and I contributed an article to a creative-critical publication edited by Leader: Logo Rewind: Trademarks of Medieval Norwich (UPP, 2024), winner of the ‘History and Tradition’ category at the 2024 East Anglian Book Awards. 

I am always happy to hear from colleagues working at libraries or heritage organisations (or indeed creative practitioners) interested in discussing potential collaborative projects based around historic book collections: please do feel free to get in touch!

January 2025 - present: Teaching Director, School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing

July 2021 - December 2024: Course Director (Undergraduate Literature Degrees), School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing

2020 - 2021: Digital Champion, School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing