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Dr Kat Addis: Hi, I'm Kat Addis and I'm a British Academy postdoctoral research fellow in the English department, where I'm writing a book about six 16th century European epic poems. And I'm also working on a podcast called Occasion of the Season about Edmund Spenser's pastoral poetry.

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The Journey into Research  

I've always loved reading and thinking about the impact of language in literature. Studying English for my undergraduate degree at Cambridge, I found the course was traditional but really exciting. I enjoyed being pushed to cover texts from historical periods that I never would have read otherwise. It was difficult but taught me how to read old texts.  

Taking an optional philosophy paper called ‘the moralists’ was a real turning point for me. We read a whole array of canonical philosophy and I was particularly struck by early modern Platonism. Here I discovered the parallels between the studies of philosophy literature and politics.

The PhD program that I did at New York University was vastly different from my studies at Cambridge. Professors were teaching their own research material, bringing together theory and texts from all disciplines. In that sense, nothing about it was traditional and it revealed a thousand ways of approaching literature.

In this context it was transformative for me to read Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, a 36,000-or-so line poem, over the course of a semester. That really got me hooked on epic as a form and the political complexities of epic poetry in the Renaissance. I am currently writing a book centred on epics, including The Faerie Queene. 

There's a strong focus in the United States on comparative literary studies. The Masters was enfolded into the PhD program and during it I took courses across all areas of literary study. Alongside courses on Renaissance epic poems from across Europe, I took some courses in Black Studies, which encompassed theory, poetry, performance. Also crucially, the history of Atlantic slavery, which reaches back to the Renaissance (the mid-fifteenth century).  It was fascinating to experience this connection across very different classrooms and discussions. The questions that occurred to me then have driven my current book project, which aims to make explicit a conversation that felt implicit at that time.

Whilst applying for academic jobs after completing my PhD, I worked for a couple of years in various different roles. I did freelance costume creation, tutored students and worked in a hat shop in Brighton.   

Now working as a research scholar, my strengths lie in my varied background throughout my education. The combination of the highly traditional Cambridge literature syllabus with an American PhD course built on a broad comparative and interdisciplinary model has had a massive impact on my current research. It has produced an immense number of questions for me that motivate and enrich the writing of my book.

The Research  

Getting the British Academy postdoc been wonderful because it provides me with three years of research time at Sussex. It's a career development fellowship, which involves some teaching but is primarily focused on research. It's been an incredible opportunity to be part of Sussex’s English department, where such good scholarship happens alongside connections to the local poetry and artistic communities.  

A main challenge has been learning six different languages, to varying degrees, including Latin and ancient Greek. The modern languages vocabulary I'm acquiring is probably hilariously antiquated, as so much of it comes from 16^th century poems.  

My book studies slavery within six European epic poems written in the 16th century. Of the three strands to my approach, the first is the historical context. Historical forms of slavery are obliquely referenced in the poems, which are about imperialism and describe activities that depended on forced labour. The second is the philosophical meanings of slavery at the time, which went back to Aristotle and Plato. The third strand is the literary tradition in which slavery was used as a metaphor for love or political situations that weren't actual enslavement.   

Over the summer I will be writing a more in-depth piece on Spenser’s The Faerie Queene for Cambridge Elements. It’s a literary-philosophical investigation of necessity and accident as concepts throughout the poem. The piece will explore how those concepts offer a way of reading the poem that can make it a sustained and relatively coherent experience, something that is difficult to attain with this epic.   

I also have a podcast, Occasion of the Season, based on Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calendar.  It is a calendrical poem about shepherds and the passing of the year in the pastoral genre. It's an informal, conversational way of experiencing this poetry through interviews and other recordings.  

As part of this I’ve recorded interviews with goat herders and commissioned a song by New York musicians, inspired by one of the eclogues. Whilst in Lisbon on a research trip, I recorded some amazing street parties celebrating the 50th anniversary of the end of the fascist regime. They went into the June episode. For the March episode I’m interviewing the Copper Family, who have been singing ancient folk songs passed down the generations for hundreds of years.  

I would like readers or listeners to see the connections between historical poetry and related dilemmas in the modern world. The social possibilities inherent in reading and discussing poetry.

Achievements and Aspirations   

I have accessed a number of great opportunities at Sussex, such as being awarded SEED funding*. This was brilliant and allowed me to put on writing workshops, which were well attended. Recently I successfully applied for AHRC Impact Acceleration Account funding. This has enabled me to organise a marathon reading of Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost on 5 April in Brighton and everyone is welcome.   

I'm organising several panels and presenting papers at the Renaissance Society of America’s conference in Boston in March. I also presented my research at an international symposium on The Faerie Queene in Finland, which is all possible because of my postdoc funding. 

Persevering with my research topic has been very difficult and extremely rewarding. I am proud of completing my PhD and continuing with my work as there were times when I had wanted to escape from my own research. My postdoc fellowship has allowed me to push past that feeling.

I’m looking forward to publishing my book, finishing the podcast and exploring ideas for other books in the future.  

My absolute dream would be to stay at Sussex and teach here. I really love it.  

*This fund has been merged into the Researcher-Led Initiative Fund run by the Sussex Researcher School.  

Interview by Shona Clements, Sussex Researcher School

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