Dr Grace Murray

Overview

Biography

Grace Murray is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication. Her current research project (2026-29) explores 'plant-writing' in London from 1562-1612, recovering how ordinary Londoners wrote about living and working with plants in a changing cityscape in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Her reconstructed ‘green archive’ will take in civic records, medical recipes, marginal annotation and collections of dried plants alongside more recognisable texts like John Gerard's Herball (1597), to understand how plants became a vital part of London's identity.

More broadly Grace is interested in the relationship between practical knowledge and the written word. To date her work has especially focused on 'how-to' books, or manuals that promised to teach readers skills like gardening, surveying, or medicine. Other research interests broadly span book history, material culture and marginalia studies, as well as garden history and place and space in the early modern period. She has held fellowships at the British Library and the Huntington Library, and previously worked at Birkbeck as a Lecturer in English Literature from 2024-26. She teaches at BA and MA level in English and in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. 

Grace has contributed to exhibitions on gardening and on Shakespeare for the British Library and York Archaeological Trust, and co-curated the National Trust exhibition 'Whispers of the Wilderness: Exploring Wilderness Gardens' at Beningbrough Hall in North Yorkshire. She has published on teaching manuscript recipe books using digital tools, and her writing has also appeared in the National Trust's Cultural Heritage magazine.

Honours and awards

• Open Research Award University of York, February 2022
• Doctoral Fellowship British Library & National Trust, February 2023
• Humanities Research Centre Postdoctoral Fellowship University of York, February 2024
• Francis Bacon Foundation Fellowship The Huntington Library, August 2026

Research

Research interests

• Book history and marginalia
• The history of reading and error
• Garden history
• Place and space, especially early modern London
• Print and manuscript recipe books

Research overview

Grace's research explores what non-literary texts, especially those concerned with green space, can tell us about how reading and writing shaped attitudes to the natural world in the early modern period. Her interdisciplinary work combines close reading with attention to the material form of the book.

Publications