Jonathan Powell

Leverhulme Early Career Fellow

Biography

Background

I joined Edinburgh in October 2025 as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of English and Scottish Literature. Before this, I was based at Leiden University, where I was lucky enough to spend almost two years as a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC-funded project, 'FEATHERS: Authorship and the Mediation of Voices, c. 1558-1642' (PI, Prof. Nadine Akkerman). Between April and June 2023, I was a research fellow on the Leverhulme Trust-funded project, 'Engendering the Stage: The Records of Early Modern Performance' (PIs, Prof. Clare McManus, Prof. Lucy Munro). I was awarded my PhD at King's College London in 2023 for a thesis on commercial theatre and English common law. During my PhD, I served for four years as (first) administrator and (later) Assistant Director for the Centre for Early Modern Studies at King's. In 2021-22, I was also a Thornley Doctoral Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research. 

Qualifications

PhD English, King's College London

MA Shakespeare in History, UCL

BA English Literature, UCL

Research summary

My research to date has largely focused on the literary and legal cultures of early modern England and Scotland. Most broadly, it sits within the following fields or sub-fields:

  • Law and Literature
  • Theatre History
  • Women's and Gender History
  • Migration Studies
  • Manuscript Studies

Current interests include the relations between fiction, rhetoric and the law; the recovery of women's voices and experiences from legal manuscripts; the place of common law in everyday life; scribes and the collaborative production of English manuscripts; alienation in theatre-historical contexts; 17th-century immigration policies; and the nature and formation of legal personhood.

Project activity

An English Legal and Literary History of the Alien, 1603-1677

The character and limits of legal personhood underwent profound shifts in the seventeenth-century British Atlantic world as processes of colonialism, slavery, and naturalization shaped the emergence of a nationality-based citizen-subjecthood. Fundamental to these shifts was a reinvention of the legal category of the alien, which saw writers turn to concepts of foreign status to imagine and justify a new alignment of liberty and Englishness. My current project recovers this reinvention, examining the crucial but unexplored role of seventeenth-century English and Scottish imaginative writing in the emergence of the modern legal alien. It asks how and why the legal category was reinvented by lawyers, poets, playwrights, and political writers, and uncovers the continuing implications of this process for histories of race, slavery, and immigration. This involves attending not just to the literary and rhetorical aspects of legal records and texts, but the far-reaching power of literature and fiction to debate and transform legal categories and ideas. Turning to writers like Robert Ayton, Anne Bradstreet, Margaret Cavendish, John Milton, and William Shakespeare, I am particularly interested in the creative processes by which foreign status came to be linked with wholesale legal unfreedom.  In the process, I show how central the emergence of the unfree alien was to the definition of English liberty: the ‘freedom of the Englishman born’.

Current project grants

Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship

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