Karen Edwards

Professor Karen Edwards is a faculty member in the Department of English within the College of Humanities at the University of Exeter, where she has taught since 1992 after relocating from the United States.

Her academic background includes:

• Ph.D. in English from Yale University (1979)
• B.A. from Brown University (1973)

Her research specializes in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, with emphasis on John Milton, natural history, biblical contexts, and political discourse. Key publications include 'Milton and the Natural World' (1999), 'Milton’s Reformed Animals: An Early Modern Bestiary' (2009), and co-edited volume 'Reading Literary Animals, Medieval to Modern' (2020). Her current monograph 'Political Animals in Early Modern England' examines vituperative animal metaphors in Reformation-to-Restoration polemics, arguing their role in escalating civil conflict and eroding biblical authority in public discourse.

Professor Edwards actively supervises postgraduate research in late sixteenth/seventeenth-century literature, Milton studies, early modern natural history, biblical literature, and seventeenth-century political culture, with research intersecting gender studies and law in context.