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Dr Aidan Norrie is the Managing Editor of The London Journal and an Honorary Fellow of the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick. They have published widely across a range of fields; extensive teaching and administrative experience, especially in quality assurance and regulatory compliance; a track record of securing competitive funding; and are passionate about expanding access to higher education.
Dr Norrie is an interdisciplinary scholar of history, literature, cultural studies, and film and television studies. They have broad research interests in early modern English literature and history; in early modern women’s writing; in children’s literature and media; and in royal authority across the globe, particularly female kingship. This diverse range of interests is reflected in Aidan’s many publications, which can be viewed on the Publications page.
Aidan is currently at work on three projects:
- Taylor Swift and Feminist Intertextuality, which is contracted to the Cambridge University Press Elements in Popular Music series.
- The Grand Budapest Hotel: Society, Identity, and Intertextuality, which is contracted to the University Press of Mississippi’s Reframing Hollywood series.
- The third, and more long-term, project is a book on seventeenth-century women poets and the Bible. Focusing on how women writers—including Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle; Lady Hester Pulter; Katherine Philips; Lucy Hutchinson; Anne Bradstreet; Jane Cavendish; Anne Killigrew; and Jane Barker—infused their poetry with the Bible in ways that have not been fully recognised, the book seeks to understand how the Bible tempered and shaped these women’s responses to the tumult of the seventeenth century.
Aidan’s primary research focus is Elizabeth I of England, and they are an internationally recognised expert in this area. Their first monograph, Elizabeth I and the Old Testament: Biblical Analogies and Providential Rule (2023), provides a fresh reassessment of this vital component of Elizabethan royal iconography, showing how biblical typology functioned as a powerful religio-political tool for Elizabeth across her reign.
Aidan studies and contextualises the last Tudor monarch’s reign and afterlife in a highly interdisciplinary fashion, and their work has been published articles in journals including Renaissance Studies, Northern History, Shakespeare Bulletin, Notes and Queries, and the Royal Studies Journal. Forthcoming works in this area include chapters on public prayers during Elizabeth’s reign, on representations of Elizabeth in Jacobean and Caroline drama, and on depictions of Elizabeth in Shakespeare biofiction.
As a literary historian, Aidan works on early modern English literature, especially in the areas of women’s writing and civic entertainments. Areas they have published in include child actors in Elizabethan civic pageantry, James Shirley’s The Cardinal, and drama by Elizabeth I.
Reflecting their interests in gender and monarchy more globally, Aidan has published essays about female Māori chiefs in Aotearoa New Zealand, female pharaohs in ancient Egypt, and lesser-known royal women, such as Cecilia, Princess of Sweden and Margravine of Baden-Rodemachern.
They also work in the field of children’s literature and media. In addition to a recently published chapter on reincarnation in the Avatar: The Last Airbender universe, Aidan has essays forthcoming on gender and adventure in Disney’s Atlantis films and the depiction of queer lives in Netflix’s The Dragon Prince.
Aidan is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Please see the Contact page for ways to get in touch.
