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Staff Profile

Dr Olivia Smith

Research Associate (Bee-ing Human)

Background

I am a writer, editor, lecturer, and researcher with a special interest in early modern literature. I work on writing that is both poetic and scientific, and I enjoy thinking about the literary history of the natural world. My favourite book at the moment is Kepler's On the Six-Cornered Snowflake (1611). Early modern texts on topics such as animals, bodies, the weather, recipes, insects, rivers and shells are my texts. 

I joined Newcastle in 2022 to work on the Bee-ing Human project, as part of a very exciting interdisciplinary team. Before moving to Newcastle I was a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in the English Faculty at the University of Oxford. I was a member of Terence Cave's Thinking With Literature project at St John's College, Oxford. In that project we looked at how literature represents, captures, enacts, and trials cognitive processes, a topic that is part of Bee-ing Human and which I am also investigating as part of the research network Writing Technolgies. 

I love working in archives and have been a consultant for English Heritage, a freelance researcher for exhibitions, and an editor for the Oxford English Dictionary. I write creatively too and was shortlisted for the White Review 2020 Short Story Prize.




Teaching

I have taught from undergraduate to PhD level, and like to teach both general and specialist subjects within literary studies. 

Each year I run courses at the Wellcome Collection, teaching graduate students how to use 'interdisciplinary' archive materials for research. I really enjoy supervising projects that involve unusual or interdisciplinary archives. 

Publications