Staff Profile

Role in the School

As a Lecturer in Renaissance Literature, I teach across all three years of our undergraduate degree, and co-ordinate a core first-year module which covers pre-1825 literature (SEL1004). I am the PG Senior Tutor, and responsible for the pastoral care which our School provides to all our postgraduate students, and for the management of assessment extensions or other adjustments. I also sit on our School’s EDI Committee, and am a member of its Curriculum Diversity group.

Expertise

I work on the intersection between material culture and literature in the early modern period. My main interests within this area are (1) the establishment of freelance writing as a potential (but often precarious) career, (2) the mobility or errancy of freelance writers, both within the urban landscape and between established structures of employment such as the theatre, printers, and aristocratic patronage, and (3) exploring the material culture related to these freelancers, such as the disconcertingly ephemeral and mobile printed ephemera which they produced. 

My interest in the careers of early modern creative writers extends to an interest in collaborating with contemporary freelancers working in the cultural and heritage industries today. I would be happy to hear from any prospective collaborative partners interested in exploring creative responses to historical texts (see the ‘research’ tab for some past examples).

I sit on the steering committee of the HaSS faculty’s MATCH research group which generates and co-ordinates research into material culture. As part of that role, I am keen to facilitate interdisciplinary research into the material history of writing and performance.

Biography

• BA (Hons) English Literature and Language (Jesus College, Oxford)
• MA in ‘Shakespeare Studies’ (King's College London and the Globe Theatre)
• Erasmus Mundus Joint-PhD in ‘Text and Event in Early Modern Europe’ (University of Kent and Universidade do Porto)
• Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA)

 My research focuses on the material and literary culture of freelance writers in the early modern period. I am especially interested in the way that professional writers like Pietro Aretino in Italy, and Thomas Nashe in England, move between stable and precarious careers, between legitimacy and errancy, and between and within urban spaces. (see the 'Background' tab for more).

Current Research Projects:

As part of an AHRC funded project initiated by Jennifer Richards (Newcastle) and Andrew Hadfield (Sussex), I am currently editing Thomas Nashe’s essay on dream interpretation, The Terrors of the Night, which I adapted for performance as part of the ‘Read not Dead’ series at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2017. This project will result in a six volume New Critical Edition of Thomas Nashe (Oxford University Press, c.2022) for which I will also be writing introductory essays on print culture and Nashe's 'lost' play The Isle of Dogs (co-written with Ben Jonson). Together with Hadfield and Richards, I am co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Nashe (OUP, c.2023) which will bring together essays which uncover this little-known writer's considerable impact on Elizabethan literature.

With Cathy Shrank (Sheffield) I am currently preparing an outreach project which will use Nashe’s Pierce Penilesse (a story of an unemployed arts graduate selling his work to the devil) to explore issues of precarious employment for today’s 16-24 year olds, especially in the arts and heritage industries. We aim to build on our experience working with creative practitioners for the Nashe Project, by collaborating with a local theatre company, a fine artist, and podcast producer to draw out contemporary themes from this Elizabethan text.  

I am also editing a special edition of Renaissance Studies (c.2021) with Will Rossiter (East Anglia) on 'Aretino's Cityscapes' which seeks to underline Pietro Aretino' extensive cultural importance in the early modern period, and highlights his contributions to the development of a new metropolitan cultural identity. 

Research supervision 

I am currently co-supervising Emily Rowe's PhD on the materiality of language in early modern literature. 

I would be happy to hear from prospective MLitt, MPhil or PhD students interested in developing a research project on any of the following:

• print authorship and literary reputations
• metadramatic scenes or plays
• European 'go-betweens' in the English theatre or print industry
• theatre history (e.g. theatre companies and their repertories; careers of individual actors; an object-oriented study of e.g. props, cosmetics, costumes)
• drama in print (e.g. the printing, censorship, or circulation of play-texts)
• popular print culture (e.g. the circulation of ephemera like pamphlets or erotica)  
• research into modern creative responses to early modern texts

I am passionate about diversifying our teaching of earlier literature at Newcastle, whether by enabling students to become active readers who can read canonical texts 'against the grain'; or by using hands-on, creative approaches to teaching plays and printed texts in seminars to bring the words off the page; or by diversifying our range of assessments to allow for inclusive teaching, which assesses not only the key skill of essay writing, but also providing alternative assessments which develop other transferable skills, such as presentation or creative projects.

For 2020-21 I will be supervising dissertations in English and Classics and English, as well as teaching on: 

Semester one:

SEL3393: Shakespeare's Showbusiness (module convener). 

Semester two:

SEL1004: Introduction to Literary Studies 2 (module convener)

SEL1023: Transformations 

SEL2201: Renaissance Bodies 

• De Rycker K. Commodifying the author: The mediation of Aretino’s fame in the Harvey-Nashe pamphlet war. English Literary Renaissance 2019, 49(2), 145-171.
• De-Rycker K. The political function of Elizabethan literary celebrity. Celebrity Studies 2017, 8(1), 157-161.
• De-Rycker K. "A world of one's own": Margaret Cavendish and the science of self-fashioning. In: Jorge Bastos da Silva, Miguel Ramalhete Gomes, ed. A trade for Light: English Literature and the Disciplines of Knowledge, Early Modern to Eighteenth Century. Leiden: Brill, Rodopi, 2017, pp.76-93.
• De Rycker K. Translating the Ragionamento: Reframing Pietro Aretino as the Castigator of Courtesans. Literature Compass 2015, 12(6), 299-309.
• De Rycker K. The Italian Job: John Wolfe, Giacamo Castelvetro and printing Pietro Aretino. In: Kirwan, Richard; Mullins, Sophie, ed. Specialist Markets in the Early Modern Book World. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2015, pp.240-256.
• De Rycker K. 'The Terrors of the Night', in The New Critical Edition of Thomas Nashe (gen eds. Richards, R; Hadfield, A; Black, J; Shrank, C). 2022. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 4. In Preparation.
• De Rycker K, Hadfield A, Richards J, ed. The Oxford Handbook to Thomas Nashe . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. In Preparation.
• De Rycker K. 'Lost Plays' in The New Critical Edition of Thomas Nashe (gen. eds. Richards, J; Hadfield, A; Black, J; Shrank, C). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. In Preparation.
• De Rycker K. 'Printing' in The New Critical Edition of Thomas Nashe (gen. eds. Richards, J; HAdfield, A; Black, J; Shrank, C). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. In Preparation.
• De Rycker K, Rossiter W. 'Introduction: Aretino's Cityscapes'. Renaissance Studies 2021. In Preparation.
• De Rycker K. ‘Staging the city: Aretino’s London peregrinations'. Renaissance Studies 2021. In Preparation.
• De Rycker K. 'Thomas Nashe and the virtual community of English writers'. In: Preedy, C; Willie, R, ed. Thomas Nashe and Literary Performances: Writing Publics. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021. In Preparation.