Departmental homepageFrom a comprehensive school background, Dr Abbott studied at Cambridge and then held a Research Fellowship at Oxford before returning to Cambridge to take up a Fellowship at St John's. She was appointed to her university position in 2014. She has held fellowships at Cornell University, the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (Cambridge), the Harvard University Institute for Renaissance Studies (Villa i Tatti, Florence), the Huntington Library (California), and the Beinecke Library (Yale University).
At undergraduate level, Dr Abbott teaches practical criticism and critical practice and the literature and history of the 18th and 19th centuries. At graduate level, she supervises MPhil and PhD students working in textual scholarship and on 18th- and 19th-century topics, and teaches for the English Faculty MPhil strand in Material Texts. She has received CUSU student-led teaching awards for both supervising and lecturing and a University Pilkington Prize for excellence in teaching.
Dr Abbott's research and teaching focus on textual scholarship and 18th- and 19th-century manuscripts, chiefly notebooks and the history of note-taking, with an emphasis on compositional practices, reading practices (including prosody and reading aloud), research practices, the history of scholarship, the organisation of knowledge and the history of institutions such as libraries, universities and museums.
Ruth Abbott, 'George Eliot: Realism and Dialectics', in The British Novel of Ideas: George Eliot to Zadie Smith, ed. Matthew Taunton and Rachel Potter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024)
Thomas Gray among the Disciplines, ed. Ruth Abbott and Ephraim Levinson (London: Routledge, 2024)
Thomas Gray's Naturalist's Journal and Commonplace Book, ed. Ruth Abbott (London: Roxburghe Club, 2024), 2 vols
Thomas Gray Manuscripts, ed. Ruth Abbott, assoc. ed. Ephraim Levinson
