Rowan Tomlinson is a comparatist who specializes in the cultural, literary, and intellectual history of the Renaissance and who works across French, Italian, English, classical and neo-Latin writers.

She is especially interested in the interactions during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries – before the creation of the ‘two cultures’ that separated the arts and the sciences – between the literary and other disciplines (natural history, the visual arts, philosophy, philology) and in the ways in which Renaissance cultures worked with the legacies of the classical past. Parallel research interests include the history and practice of liberal-arts education, in Europe and globally, and access to cultures of humanism by those outside Renaissance institutions and seats of power, be this women, writers and thinkers in colonized countries, auto-didacts, or religious or political radicals. 

Publications include essays on Rabelais, Montaigne, Poliziano, the reception of Pliny the Elder, and theories of inspiration and invention in Renaissance poetics, as well as a co-edited volume on the translation culture of England and France from 1500 to 1660. Her forthcoming monograph, Poetry and Natural History in Early Modern Europe, examines the intriguing relationship between natural history and literature across the long sixteenth century. Rigorous in its faithful depiction of the cultural particularity of the Renaissance, this book at the same time, and more generally, looks to make its readers think harder about the resources on which literature draws, the distinctiveness or otherwise of the literary, and the methods and aims of our own forms of comparative reading. 

From 2016-2018, Rowan held a Fellowship funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in recognition of the excellence and the impact, past, current, and future, of her distinctive scholarship. The project, 'Scholars, hacks, and gentlemen: the politics of authorship in Renaissance France', was concerned broadly with the socio-political status of different categories of writer from the early sixteenth century to the formation of the Académie française in 1635.

Rowan has a strong interest in exploring the methodologies that inform comparative literature and literary history and in developing fruitful interactions between historical studies and other disciplines. She is also part of the Creative Critical movement, using her expertise on the experimental genres of the Renaissance to challenge conventions in academic writing. She has published an essay in Past & Present on the similarities and differences between historians and literary historians and, in a chapter in Worlds of Comparative Literarture (Bloomsbury, 2026), edited by Wail Hassan and Shu-Mei Shih, takes to task the presentist tendencies of comparative literature.