Dr Rachel Holmes

Dr Rachel E Holmes

MA (Hons) MLitt PhD FHEA

  • Position Governing Body Fellow
  • School Arts & Humanities Faculty of English
  • Email reh90@cam.ac.uk
  • Department link English

Rachel’s research is interdisciplinary and transnational in focus, anchored in early modern English literature and culture but invested in the inter– and the trans–, that is, in the spaces between and beyond conventional national, disciplinary, and period boundaries.

Dr Rachel Holmes

Rachel grew up in Pontefract, West Yorkshire, where she attended her local comprehensive, Carleton High School, and coeducational sixth-form, NEW College. After heading to St Hugh’s College, Oxford, as an undergraduate she returned north to the University of St Andrews to complete her MA and MLitt in Shakespeare Studies. She was awarded her PhD, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, from St Andrews in 2014. Since then, she has been a Research Associate at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) and the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson, and a Lecturer in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at University College London. She rejoined Wolfson in Michaelmas 2022 as College Assistant Professor, Director of Studies, and Fellow in English.

Her doctoral work became her first book project, Clandestine Contracts: Marriage, Law, and Literary Adaptation in Early Modern Europe, completed with the support of a Philip A Knachel Fellowship from the Folger Institute, a European Research Council postdoctoral research associateship, and a Laura Bassi Scholarship. This book traces the journey across the early modern world of selected tales of clandestine marriage, the medieval institution of Christian marriage undertaken outside the recognition of legal authorities. Clandestine Contracts shows how the relationship between versions of its focal tales is shaped by legal anxieties about clandestine marriage and thereby demonstrates the centrality of legal questions to transnational literary adaptation. 

To date, Rachel’s published work has been featured in Studies in Philology, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Renaissance Studies, The New Rambler, and contracted for edited volumes with Edinburgh, Oxford, and Cambridge University Presses. Broadly interested in literary and legal structures and processes of knowing, its subjects have included, for example, the threatening contractual agency of the early modern widow, truth-seeking and the effects of rhetorical vividness in literature, law, and emotion, and teaching social justice through Shakespeare.

She is currently working on her second monograph project, Rape Myths: Representing Consent and Culpability, 1275–1736, which explores the early modern roots of contemporary Anglo-American laws governing sexual transgressions and charts a transnational transformation in the representation of rape —figured through shifts in inwardness and intention in literature— during that time. 

What's on

A triptych of abstract images: a smooth round stone nestled in a curved rock, distorted eyeglass frames scattered on a white background, and a high-contrast black and white microscopic image resembling organic or cellular structures.

Art Exhibition: Wolfson at 60

19/07/2025 at 10.00

Celebrating Wolfson’s 60th anniversary year, this exhibition highlights the range of artistic disciplines and styles that have made up our exhibitions over the years.

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Graduation Ceremony

26/07/2025 at 09.00

Graduation ceremonies are the culmination of students’ hard work and commitment, and a moment to celebrate the completion of their Cambridge degree.

A diverse group of people sits in rows of chairs, attentively listening during an indoor event or lecture.

Research Appetisers

05/08/2025 at 18.00

Come and hear our part-time students talk about their research at this informal evening of short presentations and friendly discussion.

Wolfson College main drive in Autumn

Open Cambridge - Tree Trail

06/09/2025 at 10.00

A self-guided Tree Trail around the beautiful and varied garden 'rooms' of the grounds at Wolfson College.

A handwritten poem on a black sign is mounted to a tree trunk, inviting readers to embrace the mysterious calm of evening dew.

Open Cambridge - Poetry Trail

12/09/2025 at 10.00

Follow our self-guided trail through the College gardens which feature extracts of poetry written by Wolfson members from our latest WolfWords poetry anthology, press play

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