Rachel Adcock

Biography

Before joining Keele in January 2015, I studied and worked at Loughborough University, where I obtained my doctorate in 2011 (supported by the AHRC). My research focuses on seventeenth-century women’s writing, Dissenting writing and culture, and textual studies, with a particular interest in the recovery and appreciation of historically overlooked female writers. I have published widely on women’s contributions to shaping early Puritan theology and practice and have recently contributed to a prize-winning Cambridge University Press edition of plays by Aphra Behn (1640-89), an author celebrated by Virginia Woolf as the first professional female writer in English.

For the last seven years, I have also led the School of Humanities’ approach to placements and experiential learning, ensuring all students have access to high-quality placement/project opportunities within the curriculum. Our popular Humanities placement modules have supported hundreds of students to build skills confidence, sector knowledge, and future networks, while ensuring a host of organisations have benefitted from expertise nurtured at Keele.

Research and scholarship

My research centres on women’s textual participation in seventeenth-century dissenting communities, particularly the function of women’s religious treatises, spiritual testimonies, and prophecies in early Baptist congregations. My monograph on this topic, Baptist Women’s Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640-1680 (Ashgate 2015), was shortlisted for the Richard L. Greaves Prize, awarded to outstanding scholarship devoted to the history, literature, thought, practices, and legacy of Anglophone Protestantism to 1700. I have continued to publish widely on women’s contributions to seventeenth-century puritan theology and practice and on dissenting culture more generally, and am now embarking on a project to edit The Correspondence of Richard Baxter, Vol. 7 (1676–84) for Oxford University Press. I am the Editor of Bunyan Studies: A Journal of Reformation and Nonconformist Culture and also sit on the Executive Committee for the International John Bunyan Society as European Treasurer.

I also remain committed to the recovery and exploration of early-modern women's writing. In 2014 I co-edited Flesh and Spirit: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women’s Writing (Manchester University Press) which was concerned with exploring the relationship between spiritual and corporeal understandings of religious experience. I am a contributor to the eight-volume, original spelling edition of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Aphra Behn (Cambridge University Press). Volume IV (2021), which contains my edition of Behn’s play The City-Heiress, won the 2021 Josephine Roberts Award for a Scholarly Edition, presented by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender, and the MLA Prize for a Scholarly Edition (2023). Volume III, containing my edition of The Roundheads, is forthcoming.

I would welcome PhD applications to work in any of these areas and seventeenth-century literature and culture more generally.

Teaching

I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and since 2018 I have been the Placements Lead for the School of Humanities (now the School of Humanities and Social Sciences). I have been running work placement modules in the School since 2016 and much of my teaching seeks to support students in recognising how their degree skills can be utilised in the world outside academia. In 2022 I was awarded Keele University TIPS project funding (with Jonathon Shears) to develop a framework for supporting authentic assessment in the School through a project with Tatton Park Library.