Skip to main content

Dr Grace Murray

Positions held:
  • Lecturer, School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
Email
  • Overview

    Overview

    Biography

    Grace Murray is a Lecturer in English Literature, specialising in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature and the history of reading. To date her work has centred on 'how-to' books, or practical manuals that promised to teach readers skills like gardening, surveying, or medicine. Her research puts these and other non-literary genres, like the recipe book, in conversation with literary texts and performance spaces. 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 joined Birkbeck in 2024 and teaches at BA level in English and on the MA in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. 

    Currently, Grace is revising her doctoral thesis, about how early modern authors and printers of how-to books shaped the idea of the 'useful book', for publication. 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.

    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', running at Beningbrough Hall in North Yorkshire. 

    Qualifications

    • PhD, University of York, 2024
    • MA, University College London, 2019
    • BA, University of Cambridge, 2017

    Honours and awards

    • Doctoral Fellowship, British Library & National Trust, February 2023
    • Open Research Award, University of York, February 2022
    • Humanities Research Centre Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of York, February 2024
  • Research

    Research

    Research interests

    • Book history and marginalia
    • Garden history
    • The history of reading and error
    • 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 the role of reading in shaping identity and 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.

    Since 2018 she has been pursuing research on annotations in gardening manuals dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

  • Supervision and teaching

    Supervision and teaching

    Teaching

    Teaching modules

    • The Arts: Perspectives and Possibilities (ARAR008S3)
    • Storytelling: Narrative Archetypes, Forms and Techniques (AREN256S4)
    • Medieval and Renaissance Literatures (ENHU003S5)
    • Writing London (ENHU007S4)
    • The Novel: Writing the Modern World (ENHU009S5)
    • Magic, Self and Environment:Medieval and Early Modern (ENHU071S7)