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Matt Ryan

Doctoral Student in Literature - Matt’s thesis is entitled ‘Community Values: Staging Connections in the Late Sixteenth Century Print Trade'

Research Project Title:

Community Values: Staging Connections in the Late Sixteenth Century Print Trade

 

Supervisors:

Dr Kate De Rycker, Dr Ruth Connolly and Dr Jane Nolan

Contact Details:

Email: m.ryan2@newcastle.ac.uk 

 

Research Interests:

  • Early modern prose fiction
  • Early modern book history
  • Authorial self-fashioning in sixteenth century literature
  • Representations of penury and precarity
  • Network science and the future of work

Brief Outline of Research Project:

Offering a new literary history of the Elizabethan print trade, my project will argue that those working in the early modern book industry staged connections, factions, and rivalries in their work to negotiate unanswered questions of economic, social, and cultural value in the period.

My thesis will bring letters, court records, and entries from Stationers’ Company court books together with the work of writers like Thomas Nashe, Henry Chettle, and William Baldwin to explore what these texts tell us about the collaborative-competitive dynamics of the late sixteenth century print trade, and the ever-evolving definitions of print, and professional authorship in the period.

Research Activities:

Publications:

Journal articles:

 

Magazine article:

 

Blogs:

 

Reviews:

 

Exhibitions:

  • with/in, Cork Prison, Cork (November 2025, forthcoming)

  • with/out, Spike Island Museum, Cork (May-August 2025)

  • All Eyes on Us, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork (November 2023-March 2024)
Placements, Funding and Awards

Placements and Funding

Internship at ‘You’re Dead to Me’ (BBC Radio 4), November 2024

Curatorial placement at Crawford Art Gallery, November 2023

 

Awards

Mary Robertson Fellow, Huntington Library, CA (2025-26)

Northern Bridge DTP Studentship (2022-26)

Conferences
  • ‘Safety in numbers? Forging factions in Elizabethan prose fiction,’ Society of Renaissance Studies conference, Bristol University (July 2025).
  • ‘Beyond the Frame: Fleeting creativity, long-lasting connections,’ Irish Museums Association Education and Outreach conference, Law Society of Ireland, Dublin (May 2025).
  • ‘On the run: Martin Marprelate and his afterlives,’ Centre for Print History Conference, Newcastle University (August 2024).
  • ‘Unquiet Spryttes: Martin Marprelate and his tactics of resistance,’ SHARP conference, (Reading University, July 2024)
  • ‘At Wolfe’s Kitchin: Print communities in the 1590s,’ Printing Centres and their Peripheries conferece (National Library of Lithuania, Vilnius; October, 2023) 
  • ‘So ends the Ceremony of the Day: The performance of renewal in Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises,’’ Postgraduate conference, (Newcastle University, June 2023)
  • ‘It did make Powle's churchyard resound: Building community in the sixteenth and twenty-first century creative industries,’ Northern Early Modern Network Conference (Durham University and Strathclyde University, May 2023)
  • ‘Intergenerational Collaboration in Early Modern Recipe Books’ at the Newberry Graduate Conference (Newberry Library, USA; January 2022)
Memberships and Outreach Projects

Memberships

Postgraduate fellow of the Royal History Society

Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP)

The Bibliographical Society

 

Outreach Projects

‘Beyond the Frame’: Outreach project undertaken Cork Prison, in conjunction with Crawford Art Gallery.

Academic Background:

  • BA English Language and Literature, Oxford University
  • MA Early Modern Studies, UCL

 

Website:

www.matttellsstories.co.uk 

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