Eli Cumings

BA, University of Bristol (2016); MPhil, University of Cambridge (2018); PhD, University of Cambridge (2023).

Eli Cumings is a literary scholar of the early modern period. Her first book project explores how popular theology, and in particular the concept of divine providence, structured thinking about human difference in post-Reformation England. Moving through a series of more and less explicitly literary forms--including prodigy broadsides, travel narratives, and a moral allegory--the book shows how the application of providential interpretative strategies claimed to make bodies legible, with differences from European Christian corporeal and cultural norms interpreted as the sign of divine intervention (and, most often, divine judgement). Other recurrent themes in Eli's research include: the relationship between religion and race-making in early modernity; conceptualisations of the human and human difference across time; and the relationship between providence and allegory as strategies for making the earthly world both legible and comprehensible.

Eli's forthcoming work explores the interpretation of dermal blackness in Reformation prodigy literature; the affective dimensions of early modern famine accounts; and the ideological implications of an all-Black adaptation of Macbeth staged in colonial Zimbabwe.