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$$ \text{BOOKS THAT HUM} $$
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$$ \color{grey}{Choir~of~Paper~|~Early~Modern~ Vernacular~Intellectual~History~and~Book~History} $$
$$ \text{ABOUT} $$
$$ \text{ACADEMIC RESEARCH} $$
$$ \text{PUBLIC HISTORY} $$
My research is concerned with knowledge. What counts as knowledge? Who writes it, and who reads? What counts as a text?
I work in early modern vernacular intellectual history and book history. I am interested not only in ideas themselves, but in the mechanisms that allow ideas to travel: reading practices, textual use, annotation, and preservation. Much of my work focuses on the spaces where these processes are most visible: marginalia, practical texts, manuscript–print encounters, and the ordinary records through which people organised thought.
I often describe my work as an exploration of the intellectual life of texts. My research is drawn to proximity and exclusion, and to the awkward spaces between categories that scholarship has not always centred. I am particularly interested in readers and writers who existed close to systems of knowledge without being fully recognised within them structurally. This includes individuals whose engagement with texts shaped intellectual culture but did not always appear within formal institutions or canonical traditions. Across my projects, recurring themes include time, the body, memory, and inheritance, particularly in relation to women’s engagements with written materials in the early modern period.
I am an early modern historian trained at the University of Cambridge (King’s College), where I began my studies in 2021 and graduated in 2024. I recently completed a master’s degree in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at the University of York. I hold PhD offers from the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge.
My doctoral research has also shaped BOOKS THAT HUM, an online ecosystem of public history and digital scholarship. Hosted across multiple platforms, the project stages different moments in the formation of intellectual life: fragments of arguments, the labour of interpretation, the emotional atmosphere of thinking, and the responsibilities that come with historical knowledge. Within this structure, CHOIR OF PAPER functions as the scholarly centre of this work.
My work ultimately asks how intellectual life becomes visible in places where it was not always expected to be found.
East, Rachel. ‘Gender Memory, and Violence in the Early Modern British Isles’. The Yale Historical Review. Volume XVI, Spring 2025.
East, Rachel. June 2025. Where Violence Lingers: Rape, Memory and Trauma. "Lament and bewayle": Early Modern War Narratives”, King’s College London.
East, Rachel. March 2025. ‘Women’s Imagination Spaces and Power’. Dissertation Conference, University of York.
Under Review
East, Rachel. ‘Bodies and Biospheres: Environment, Trauma, and the Female Body in Shakespeare’s Lucrece and Titus Andronicus’. In ****Sustainable Shakespeare. Edited by **Prof (Dr) Seema Raizada and Prof (Dr) Rolii Agrawal.
East, Rachel. ‘Seeing the page**:** The bridge between printed and manuscript technologies on the corrected pages of Margaret Cavendish’s presentation copies’. The Gordon Duff Prize Submission, 2026, The University of Cambridge.
Conferences
East, Rachel. April 2026. Hands on the Page: Marginalia, Memory, and Women’s Use of Early Modern Practical Texts. ‘Verse with wings of skill': Reading the Practical in Early Modern Literature, University of Sheffield.
East, Rachel. May 2026. “For My Own Review and Use”: Private Justice and the Memory of Violence in Sarah Cowper’s First Diary (1700–1702). Gender, Violence and the Early Moderns Workshop, European University Institute, Florence.
East, Rachel. June 2026. The Restless Dead: Grief, Denied Burial, and the Protestant Afterlife of Violence in the 1641 Depositions. 'Death and Bereavement in Early Modern Britain, 1520-1689', University of St Andrews.
