Catherine Evans

Catherine Evans joined the University of Manchester in 2021 as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, after holding an associate lecturer position at the University of York. She is an early modernist with interests in book history, religious literature, women’s writing, and the philosophy of time. Her research has been supported with fellowships from the John Rylands Research Institute, the Huntington Library, UCLA-Clark Library, IASH at the University of Edinburgh, and the University of McGill. Since 2018 Catherine has been a research assistant on the Gateway to Early Modern Manuscript Sermons project, based at the University of Regina. 

She has taught at the Universities of Edinburgh, York, and Sheffield, where she completed her PhD in 2019 with funding from WRoCAH.

Catherine works on religious literature from the mid sixteenth to late seventeenth centuries, with particular specialisms in devotional poetry, sermon culture, and book history. Her research explores how early modern readers and writers experienced books in time, and how the materiality of books enforced specific readerly responses and actions. She is interested in the relationships between text and speech, books and events, and materiality and emotion. She has published (and forthcoming) work on topics including the psalm translations of Mary Sidney Herbert and Anne Lock, George Herbert’s reception history, and the marketing of early modern sermons. 

Her current Leverhulme funded project is entitled, Reflecting Devotion: Lustrous Materials in England, Scotland and Ireland 1603-1700. This project looks at how reflective materials, specifically pearls and glass, played a part in seventeenth century protestant devotion.