Category:Daniel Starza Smith

After several years working as a travel journalist for Time Out, I realised that my true calling lay in the manuscripts room of the British Library, where I became obsessed first with an anonymous Stuart play fragment, then the sprawling, messy Conway Papers archive, which contained poetry by John Donne. My interest in Donne’s manuscripts continues: most recently I have published on a text of his Catalogus librorum discovered at Westminster Abbey in 2016.Before coming to King’s I taught at the University of Reading and UCL, before taking up a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Lincoln College, Oxford, focusing on Donne’s women patrons. I have worked on the landmark Donne Variorum, am a member of the ‘Signed, Sealed, & Undelivered’ project, and, with Jana Dambrogio of MIT Libraries, am developing ‘letterlocking’, the study of epistolary security before the invention of the envelope.