Dr Eve Houghton is a Research Fellow in English at St John’s College. She studied for an MPhil at Cambridge inbetween a BA and a PhD at Yale.
At Cambridge, Dr Houghton teaches on the Shakespeare, Material Renaissance and Early Modern Drama papers and supervises undergraduate dissertations on early modern topics. She has also taught at UCL and Yale, where she designed and taught the modules "What Was Reading?" and "Comedies of Manners: Shakespeare to Sally Rooney."
Dr Houghton's research focuses on early modern English literature, particularly prose fiction and the history of the novel, theatre history and book history and bibliography. Her essays have appeared in Critical Inquiry, ELH, and The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America. Her book in progress, He Said/She Said: Free Indirect Style Before the Novel, is about emerging methods for representing speech and thought in 16th-century English fiction. Free indirect style is associated with the novel, but it has a history that pre-dates the novel as a genre. Lacking novelistic methods (eg quotation marks), writers like George Gascoigne, John Lyly, and Thomas Nashe adapted conventions from existing forms such as the dialogue, the sonnet sequence, and the playbook to figure the transition from one consciousness to another. Focusing particularly on narrative depictions of sexual consent and sexual assault, He Said/She Said argues that this protoform of free indirect style foregrounds, with particular urgency, narration’s entanglement with the ethical stakes of understanding and giving voice to other people’s experiences.
“He Said/She Said: Free Indirect Style Before the Novel.” Critical Inquiry 51.2 (winter 2025): 247-267.
“Fops vs Tops: Character and Attention in The Country Wife.” ELH 90.3 (fall 2023): 667-691.
“Private Owners, Public Books: Henrietta Bartlett’s Feminist Bibliography.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 116.4 (winter 2022): 567-587.
“Overmeasure: The Indexes of Francis Daniel Pastorius.” In The Book Index through History, eds. Dennis Duncan and Eve Houghton. Forthcoming.
