Paddy Bullard
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0118 378 7469
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Associate Professor
Associate Professor of English Literature and Book History
Responsibilities: Head of Department (joint appointment)
Areas of interest
My teaching and research focus on English writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Satire, political philosophy and the history of the printed book are the main themes in my work.
I also write on a range of rural topics, including landscape, georgic poetry, traditional song and environmental sustainability. In 2024-5 I led the NERC-funded project 'Futures of UK Treescapes in National Landscapes: The Chilterns and Beyond'. Over the last decade I have collaborated often with colleagues at Reading's Museum of English Rural Life, where I have been Senate-elected member of the advisory committee since 2019.
My most recent book is Satire, Instruction and Useful Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Britain: The Enlightenment Mock Arts (CUP, 2025). 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 and the first industrial revolution) because it is tacit and unspecifiable, reproducible only by example or personal habituation. My first book, Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric (CUP, 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 editor of The Oxford Handbook of Eighteenth-Century Satire (2019)
I have an on-going interest in scholarly editing. With Timothy Michael I am co-editor of volume 15 (Later Prose) of The Oxford Edition of the Works of Alexander Pope. 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 produced a volume of essays, Jonathan Swift and the Eighteenth-Century Book (CUP, 2013), which I co-edited with James McLaverty, and the digital editions at the Jonathan Swift Archive. I am a member of the review college for the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I am a Fellow of the HEA, and a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) .
Postgraduate supervision
I have supervised successful PhDs on twentieth-century women’s publishing, the early-modern book trade, enlightenment-period libraries 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, on satire and on rural studies.