Dr Paddy Bullard

Biography

Dr. Paddy Bullard is currently working as a Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature, University of Reading , United Kingdom. Iam co-director of the Centre for Collections-Based Research at Reading. My teaching and research are historical, and focus on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Satirical writing, political thought and the history of the printed book (together with material culture studies more broadly) are the big themes in my work. I also write on a range of rural topics, including georgic poetry, traditional song and non-urban environments. I am working at the moment on a monograph, On Knowing More Than You Can Say: An Enlightenment Problem, 1640-1815. It describes how writers in an age of open inquiry dealt with knowledge that cannot be disseminated freely in print (the conventional technology of enlightenment) because it is tacit and unspecifiable, reproducible only by example or personal habituation. My first book, Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric (Cambridge University Press, 2011), traces the origins of Burke's thinking about political deliberation in seventeenth-century theories of moral psychology, and in the 'commonwealthsman' political culture of eighteenth-century Ireland. For OUP I am currently editing The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire. Since 2004 I have worked on the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift, first as an AHRC research fellow at St. Catherine's College, Oxford, and currently as associate editor. This collaboration has yielded a volume of essays, Jonathan Swift and the Eighteenth-Century Book (Cambridge University Press, 2013), co-edited with James McLaverty, and the digital archive at the Jonathan Swift Archive I am a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). RESEARCH SUPERVISION I have supervised successful PhDs on the early-modern book trade and on the eighteenth-century novel. I am interested in supervising doctoral research on all aspects of eighteenth-century and Romantic writing, on book history and on traditional song.  

Research Interest

My teaching and research are historical, and focus on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Satirical writing, political thought and the history of the printed book (together with material culture studies more broadly) are the big themes in my work. I also write on a range of rural topics, including georgic poetry, traditional song and non-urban environments.