Dr Akkerman will be with us 27 May - 4 July 2014 and will be hosted by Dr Hugh Adlington, School of English, Drama and American & Canadian Studies, in association with the Centre for Literary Editing and Materiality of the Text (CLEMT), the Centre for Reformation and Early Modern Studies (CREMS) and the Institute for Textual Scholarships and Electronic Editing (ITSEE).
Dr Akkerman is internationally recognised as an outstanding researcher, with an impressive publications record in early modern literary and historical studies. Volume 2 of Dr Akkerman’s three-volume Oxford University Press edition of The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia was published in 2011, with Volumes 1 and 3 scheduled to appear in 2014 and 2015. Dr Akkerman’s is the first complete edition of Elizabeth Stuart’s letters: the edition not only presents a fascinating portrait of a pivotal cultural, political and religious figure in early modern Europe, it also provides a mass of new information related to Elizabeth’s correspondence with a far-reaching network of powerful statesmen and women, politicians, diplomats, churchmen and scholars.
Dr Akkerman’s related research projects include: Elizabeth Stuart: A Biography (OUP; forthcoming 2017); Ed. (with Birgit Houben), The Politics of Female Households: Early Modern Ladies-in-Waiting Across Europe (Brill; forthcoming 2014); a book forthcoming in 2015 from Dr Akkerman’s NWO-funded VENI research project, Female Spies or She-Intelligencers: Towards a Gendered History of Espionage; and a digital resource arising from Women’s Early Modern Letters Online (WEMLO), funded by the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust.
Full details of the plans for the visit will be available soon but will include a public discussion between Dr Akkerman and Professor Lisa Jardine on Challenges for Early Modern Women's History, to be held at the Barber Institute, University of Birmingham, Wednesday 18th June 2014 (16:30-17:30). Dr Akkerman will also be the keynote speaker at a one-day international colloquium, to be held at the Shakespeare Institute, 28th June 2014. The colloquium will bring together international scholars working on various aspects of Cultural Production in Early Modern Households. Attendance to this event is free, but booking is essential.