Maria Pace Aquilina

Maria Pace Aquilina holds a Doctorate from the University of Sheffield in English literature focusing on sixteenth-century Tudor England. The research focuses on the relationship between occluded authorial agency and women writers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Through a thorough analysis of different paratextual techniques found in the works of four specific women-authors from the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, the study seeks to negotiate women’s precarious position on the margins of mainstream male literary culture.

Maria read for a first degree in Education between 1998 and 2002, followed by a Master’s degree in Applied Language studies from the University of Malta in 2009. She has worked as a tutor of English across all educational levels, starting from the early years up to an advanced stage. In recent years, she was responsible for teaching both language and literature particularly the poetry of Scottish poet, Carol Ann Duffy as well as various Shakesperean Dramas. She also taught English as a second language to foreigners.
Maria also formed part of the Malta Writing Project which sought to integrate and advance the love for writing across all ages in both Maltese and English language. She was also involved in the Maltese Literacy Programme which involved promoting basic Maltese and English literacy in both young and adult learners.

Maria has attended and presented in various conferences both on a national and international level. This included a conference about the genre of translation as a cross-disciplinary perspective on text, language and culture being held in Sheffield in 2019, and on the theme of exclusion in the early modern period especially in crucial work being done on critical race studies, gender, marginal race studies and violence which was held in Glasgow in 2023.

Presently, she is involved in the MERLIT project at Vrije Universiteit Brussel as a postdoctoral researcher in the dramatic works written and staged during the Restoration era in England during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. The research focuses on how meritocratic narratives in the aftermath of the turbulent civil war years and the interregnum period in seventeenth-century England, helped to negotiate and shape individual progress and self-realisation as part of a new formation of Europe at the detriment of the ‘other’ worlds such as transatlantic slavery and the repression of indigenous groups.

Maria has published the following works:

• Women Writers in Tudor England: Male Occluded Female Agency and the Recovery of Authorial Voice.
• Isabella Whitney: A Reconsideration of the Female Author. ~‘Edited Collection,’ The University of Glasgow.
• God Hath Given Me the Gyfte of Knowledge, but not of Utterance: Erroneous Critical Constructions of the Female Voice in Anne Askew’s ‘The Examinations.’
  ~Journal of the Northern Renaissance.