This Little World    
A New History of Tudor and Stuart England

This Little World: A New History of Tudor and Stuart England (Bloomsbury, 2026) offers a major reappraisal of early modern England as a society shaped by movement, encounter, and exchange. Drawing on extensive archival research, it reconstructs the period through the lives of merchants, migrants, travellers, writers, artists, and envoys, revealing a polity far less insular than its familiar literary and historical self-image might suggest. And in reframing England's story within a wider world, it challenges us to rethink some of our most fundamental ideas: about nationhood, about identity, and above all, about belonging.

Nandini Das is Professor of Early Modern English Literature and Culture and a Fellow of Exeter College, University of Oxford. Her work focuses on literature, travel, and cross-cultural encounter in the early modern world. Among her books are Renaissance Romance: The Transformation of English Prose Fiction, 1570-1620 (2011) and The Cambridge History of Travel Writing (2019), co-edited with Tim Youngs. Her most recent book on the first English embassy to India 1614-1619, Courting India: England, Mughal India, and the Origins of Empire, was the Spectator, Prospect, and History Today Book of the Year in 2023, longlisted for the Cundhill Prize, shortlisted for the Duff Cooper and Wolfson History Prizes, and received the 2023 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding.

Katherine (Katie) Larson is Professor of English at the University of Toronto and Vice-Dean Teaching, Learning, and Undergraduate Programs at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Her research and teaching are rooted in feminist practices and focus on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women’s writing; gender, language, and embodiment; music and song; and critical pedagogy. She is the author of Early Modern Women in Conversation (Palgrave, 2011; pbk. 2015) and co-editor of Gender and Song in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2014; Routledge, 2016) and Re-Reading Mary Wroth (Palgrave, 2015). Her most recent book, The Matter of Song in Early Modern England: Texts in and of the Air (Oxford University Press, 2019; pbk. 2022), integrates her training as a singer through an open access online companion recording. Professor Larson has published widely in journals and essay collections on topics including early modern poetry and drama, women’s writing, the gendering of space and sound, game-playing, and operatic and film adaptation. 

Current projects include The Post-Pandemic University: Storying Possibilities (in development for Routledge, co-edited with Alysia Kolentsis), a collaborative open access volume that bridges her work in academic leadership and literary studies, and The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wroth (in development for Cambridge University Press). Professor Larson’s work has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Connaught Foundation, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Bodleian Library, the Renaissance Society of America, and the Jackman Humanities Institute. A Member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists, she is the recipient of the John Charles Polanyi Prize for Literature and a Rhodes Scholarship (Minnesota & Lincoln 2000).

Please feel free to submit any questions in advance to alumni@rhodeshouse.ox.ac.uk or you can use the Q&A function within Zoom to ask questions directly during the live event.

Part of the Lifelong Fellowship portfolio, The Scholars’ Library is a monthly book talk series, where Rhodes alumni can come together to present, discover and debate their literary works. If you’re interested in getting involved, please reach out to alumni@rhodeshouse.ox.ac.uk