Dr. Simon Mills

Geburtsjahr: 1980

Studium:
BA (Hons) University of Wales, Bangor (2003)
MA (Dist.) University of Manchester (2005)
PhD Queen Mary, University of London (2009)

Wissenschaftliche Anstellungen bzw. Tätigkeiten:
2010-2011 British Institute Scholar, Council for British Research in the Levant, Amman, Jordan
2011-2013 Mellon/Newton Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge
2013-2014 POINT Fellow, Dahlem Humanities Centre, Freie Universität Berlin
2014-2017 Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, School of History, University of Kent
2017-2019 Teaching Fellow in British and European History (1500-1800), Newcastle University

Wichtige wissenschaftliche Funktionen und Mitgliedschaften:
2019- Lecturer in Early Modern History, Newcastle University

'Oriental Poetry' between the late Renaissance and the high Enlightenment

At the IZEA, I plan to begin a new project tracing the idea of 'Oriental poetry' between the early seventeenth and the early nineteenth centuries. The concept of 'Oriental poetry' is fundamental to a host of Enlightenment concerns. It is well known that the pioneering Oxford professor and later Anglican bishop Robert Lowth's lectures De sacra poesi Hebræorum ('On the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews', 1753) exerted a profound influence over the early development of Romantic poetry: the poet reimagined in the image of the biblical prophet. Lowth and his editor, the German biblical scholar Johann David Michaelis, were also fundamental to an emerging sense among Enlightenment thinkers of the Old Testament as a unique type of ancient literature: the Bible reconceived as poetry. We might look, too, to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's deep empathy with Islamic poetry, for instance, or to the success in England of the scholar and future jurist William Jones's translations of poems from Arabic, Turkish, and Persian. Yet so far lacking is any longue durée history which traces these developments back to their origins in the advanced oriental scholarship which emerged in the European universities in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. My project will explore how both a sophisticated body of new technical knowledge about poetry in Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, and other eastern languages and a series of ideas concerning poetry, language, inspiration, and the 'poetic nature' of ancient 'Oriental' peoples intersected and were transmitted, debated, and transformed between Renaissance and Enlightenment.

Selbständige Schriften

A Commerce of Knowledge: Trade, Religion, and Scholarship between England and the Ottoman Empire, c. 1600-1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020)

Beiträge in Zeitschriften und Sammelbänden

'Reading Henry Maundrell's Sacred Geography in Eighteenth-Century England and Germany', in Textual Transformations: Purposing and Repurposing Texts from Richard Baxter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. N. H. Keeble and Tessa Whitehouse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 210-26'Scripture and Heresy in the Biblical Studies of Nathaniel Lardner, Joseph Priestley, and Thomas Belsham', in Dissent and the Bible in Britain, 1650-1950, ed. Michael Ledger-Lomas and Scott Mandelbrote (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 85-112