Traherne Online Research Network

The Oxford Traherne edition, under its general editor Dr Julia Smith, has recently set up a Traherne Online Research Network. Scholars working on Traherne are widely scattered, and do not often have the opportunity either to hear about current research, or to talk about their own work with other Traherne experts. The online research network facilitates this by building up a community of Traherne scholars, which will also help to raise his profile with other scholars and with students.

The Traherne Online Research Network meets regularly 3 times a year (October, January, April) via Zoom to listen to and discuss a short research paper, and to raise research queries. You do not need to be an academic researcher to attend the seminars, and students and others interested in Traherne are very welcome.

Our next meetings are follows: 

Thursday 15 May 2025, 5.00 p.m. London time (BST): Dr Tessie Prakas, Associate Professor of English, Scripps College, 'Traherne's Background Noise: The Poetic Forms of Silence'

Thursday 12 June 2025, 5.00 p.m. London time (BST): Traherne Reading Group
Discussion of the articles 'Adulterie' and 'Bastard' from Commentaries of Heaven, led by Colin Redemer, Saint Mary’s College of California.
A PDF file of the text will be distributed in advance to participants.
 

Your suggestions are welcomed as to how else the network can encourage the exchange of ideas on Traherne.

To join the mailing list for the network, to receive the Zoom link for a seminar, or to offer a paper, please contact Dr Julia Smith.

Previous seminar papers

26 October 2023    Professor Sarah Hutton, University of York, '”I need not treat of Vertues in the ordinary way”: Ordinary and un-ordinary discussion of virtue in Traherne’s Christian Ethicks’

18 January 2024    Dr Thomas Clifton, Coventry University, ‘Recontextualizing Verse and Thought in Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations and his Works’

18 April 2024     Professor Gary Kuchar, University of Victoria, 'The Baptismal Spirituality of Thomas Traherne's Commentaries of Heaven'

13 June 2024    Traherne Reading Group: discussion of ‘Apprehension’ from Commentaries of Heaven and ‘The Apprehension’ from the Dobell Folio, led by Professor Timothy Harrison, University of Chicago

31 October 2024   Thomas Traherne 350 Online Symposium. Full details of the programme can be found here.

30 January 2025    Professor Jacob Blevins, Sam Houston State University, 'Traherne and the Anxiety of Joy'

3 April 2025    Traherne Reading Group: discussion of ‘Accesse’ from Commentaries of Heaven, led by Professor Ana Elena González-Treviño, National Autonomous University of Mexico, and visiting professor at King's College London

• Left image: Detail of Brasenose College, from David Loggan, Oxonia Illustrata (Oxford, 1675): courtesy of Yale Center for British Art
• Right image: Osborn MS b308, p. 159 (‘Select Meditations’, III.83): The James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University