Claire Jowitt

Claire Jowitt is an English academic who writes on race, cross-gender, piracy, identity, empire and performance. She holds a personal chair in English at Southampton University and previously was Professor of Renaissance English Literature at Nottingham Trent University (2005–12) and Lecturer and Senior Lecturer at Aberystwyth University (1996–2005).^[1]

Jowitt's work

Her work on the representation of outsiders such as Jews,^[2] Turks^[3] and pirates^[4] in Renaissance literature and culture has cast light on the complex and contradictory nature of contemporary attitudes to "others". She argues that allegorical allusions to domestic English political issues are important as well as the dominant view that literary representations played an important role in the shaping of a national consciousness. Her examination of two early modern English "Turk" plays Lust's Dominion and The Turke notes the light they cast on the domestic concerns of the culture within which they were produced alongside their negative depiction of Islamic men and their contribution to contemporary anti-Muslim sentiment.^[5]

Likewise in her analysis of the development of the pirate romance at the end of the sixteenth century and beginning of the seventeenth, Jowitt notes the ambivalence of attitudes to the ideology and practice of piracy – maritime violence – in an England that was becoming known internationally as "a nation of pirates". She describes how the portrayal of piracy in contemporary literature became an index for other domestic concerns. She suggests that the depiction of pirates in Sir Philip Sydney's New Arcadia as in some respects acting little differently from any group of fighting men may reflect the ambivalence of English attitudes towards "men of action" like Sir Francis Drake. For Prince Musidorus, piracy and pirates are not condemned outright – if they can be serviceable to his cause, and are successful, then he supports them, in the same flexible way as Queen Elizabeth gave semi-official support to the "patriotic violence of Drake and Hawkins.^[6]

Hakluyt Editorial Project

In May 2008, a major interdisciplinary conference called Richard Hakluyt 1552–1616: Life, Times, Legacy, examining the significance of Hakluyt's work, was jointly organised by the National Maritime Museum, the Centre for Travel Writing Studies, Nottingham Trent University and the National University of Ireland, Galway. A major aim of the conference was to lay the groundwork for and establish a network of scholars to prepare a new edition of Hakluyt's Principal Navigations. Those leading this group include Nigel Rigby, Will Ryan (President of the Hakluyt Society), and the project's editors Daniel Carey (NUI, Galway), Andrew Hadfield (University of Sussex) and Claire Jowitt (NTU).^[7]

Professional recognition

From 2005–2008 Claire Jowitt was Honorary Secretary of the Society for Renaissance Studies.^[8] In 2008 Jowitt was elected a Fellow of The English Association.^[9] In 2010 Jowitt received an Institute of Historical Research Scouloudi Publication Award for the publication of "The Culture of Piracy 1580 – 1630: English Literature and Seaborne Crime"^[10]

Books

• 2010. The culture of piracy 1580–1630: English literature and Seaborne crime . Farnham : Ashgate Press.^[11]
• 2006. Pirates? The politics of plunder, 1550–1650 . Basingstoke : Palgrave.^{[12][13][14][15]}
• 2003. Voyage drama and gender politics 1589–1642: real and imagined worlds . Manchester : Manchester University Press.^{[16][17][18][19][20]}
• 2002 with Watt, D., eds.,. The arts of seventeenth-century science: representations of the natural world in European and North American culture. Aldershot : Ashgate Press.

Other publications

• 2010, Renaissance Pirates, BBC History Magazine, July Vol 11, No. 7

References