Olivia Smith

I work on early modern literature of several types - fictional, scientific, philosophical and medical - investigating histories of how humans create, communicate and corroborate knowledge. My PhD thesis, written in London and examined by Lorraine Daston and Harold Cook in 2009, was about John Locke and the body. I am developing this into a book. After my AHRC-funded PhD I held a FWO postdoctoral fellowship in Ghent. I am now a postdoctoral research fellow at St John's College, Oxford, working on the project Literature as an Object of Knowledge.

Current topics of interest: C16-17 literature John Locke Manuscripts; fictional places; facts as past acts / the idea of descriptions that are 'true to life'; philosophical and inspired epistles; the difference between theories of language and theories of communication; sensory knowledge and relational space; gut reactions; history of the environment; writing that is morally experimental.