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School of English and Drama

Archive

2023

25 January 2023: Philippa Hellawell (The National Archives). ‘African Knowledge and Skill in the Royal African Company Archive’.

8 February: Mathelinda  Nabugodi (Cambridge): ‘A Chamæleonic Race’: Shelley and the Discourses of Slavery.

8 March.  Ian Newman (Notre Dame). 'The Flash Manner of Singing': Performing in the Streets of Eighteenth-Century London.

29 March. James Streintrager (UC Irvine). 'Erotic Antiquarians: Excavating the Libertine Networks of Eighteenth-Century Europe'.

2022

1 February. Freya Gowrley (Bristol). ‘I love her as my own child’: Inheritance, Extra-Illustration, and Queer Domesticities at Strawberry Hill.

3 March. Alice Insley (Tate). Curatorial talk on Hogarth exhibition. event co-hosted with the QM Visual & Material Forum.

15 March. Jordan Goodman (UCL). 'Planting the World: Joseph Banks and his Collectors'. 

5 April. Stella Tillyard. 'The Red Line and the Blue Sea: Five Lives in Revolutionary Times'. 

12 April. Timothy Michael (Lincoln College, Oxford). ‘Hazlitt’s Philosophical Criticism’.

24 May. Thomas Laqueur (UC Berkeley). 'Revisiting Solitary Sex'. Event co-hosted with QM Solitudes Project and QM SexCult seminar. 

5 October. Sarah Fox, Karen Harvey and Emily Vine (University of Birmingham). 'Material Identities, Social Bodies: Embodiment in British Letters c.1680-1820'. Co-hosted with IHS British History in the Long 18th Century. 

9 November. Brycchan Carey (Northumbria). ‘The parson-naturalist abroad: William Smith and Griffith Hughes’s dubious natural histories of the Caribbean'.

7 December. Joseph Cozens (UCL). ‘In Defiance of Law and Justice’: Smuggling Gangs and the English State, 1720-1820.

2021

30 November. David O'Shaughnessy (NUI Galway).  ‘Accounting for Taste: the Business of Georgian Theatre’.

7 July. Miranda Eva Stanyon (Melbourne). ‘Resounding the Sublime: Music in English and German Literature and Aesthetic Theory, 1670-1850’.

23 March. Nicole Aljoe (Northeastern). "Racing the ‘Rise’ of the 18th-century British Novel Black Lives and the Development of the English Novel from 1688-1832".

6 April. Michael J. Griffin (Limerick). “London Irish: Goldsmith’s 'Retaliation' Revisited".

5 May. Elin Jones (Exeter). ‘The Mechanical Warship: Naval Seamanship and Useful Knowledge in the Eighteenth Century’.

2020

3 March. James Morland (QMUL). The Sadness of Care: Solitude and Eighteenth-Century Physician Poets. 

11 February. Tess Somervell (Leeds). The Doubting Plowman: Climate and Contingency in Eighteenth-Century Georgic Poetry.

28 January. Hannah Williams (QMUL). Artists’ Things: Material Cultures of the Paris Art World.

2019

29 October. Sophie Gee (Princeton). Communion, Communication and Sacrifice in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones.

15 October. Robbie Richardson (Kent). Unwitnessing Meaning: British Understandings of Wampum in the Eighteenth Century.

1 October. Penelope Corfield (RHUL and Newcastle). Change within Change: The Decline of the Deep Bow/Curtsey and the Rise of the Egalitarian Handshake in Eighteenth-Century Britain.

26 March. Naomi Billingsley (Manchester/John Rylands Research Institute). Extra-Illustrating the Macklin Bible.

12 March. Dror Wahrman (Hebrew University of Jerusalem). The prince, the jeweller and the mogul: on the paradoxes of an early modern object.

29 January. Chloe Wigston-Smith (University of York). Women’s Work and the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World.

2018

4 December. Anne Thell (National University of Singapore). Resisting the Sovereignty of Sight in Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands (1775).

6 November. Karen Harvey (Birmingham). What is a Material History of the Body?

23 October. Innes Keighren (RHUL). The forgotten lives of William Macintosh in the Age of Revolution: from Caribbean planter to traveller in India; from spy in France to exile in Germany.

9 October. Rebecca Spang (Indiana University, Bloomington). Brothers without Fraternity: Male Sibling Relations and the French Revolution.

8 June. Suvir Kaul (University of Pennsylvania). Apostrophe as a Theory of History.

24 April. Kathleen Murphy (Cal Poly). Searching for Goliath: Dru Drury, Insect Collecting and the Eighteenth-Century British Slave Trade.

20 February. Hilary Davidson (University of Sydney). Dress and dressmaking: Regency ribbons and replicas.

6 February. Mark Philp (Warwick). Resisting politics in the 1790s.

30 January. Jean-Jacques Courtine (University of Auckland and l’Université Paris-Sorbonne). The Theatre of Monsters in eighteenth-century Paris: an Archaeology of Curiosity.

23 January 2018. Sarah Easterby-Smith (St Andrews). Seeds of knowledge: a microhistory of colonial science at the end of the French old regime. 

2017

12 December. Peter de Bolla (Cambridge). Distributional Concept Analysis.

3 November. Alice Dolan (QMUL). Touching Linen: Textiles, Emotion and Bodily Intimacy in England c. 1708-1818.

17 October. Jessica Patterson (QMUL). Mughals, Maharajas and the East India Company: Col. Alexander Dow’s (1735-1779) assessment of Religion and Empire.

22 May. Anne Vila (University of Wisconsin). Solitude and [Dis]order: Perspectives from Eighteenth-Century French Literature and Medicine.

28 February. Norma Clarke (Kingston). Goldsmith and his Biographers: ‘a really English worthy’ or ‘Irish if you will’.

31 January. Rosalind Carr (East London). ‘A Landscape of Feeling’? Politeness, Violence and Masculinity in early New South Wales, c.1788-1815.

17 January. Stephen Bending (Southampton). Pleasure Gardens and the Problems of Pleasure c.1650-1830.

2016

26 October. Katrina O’Loughlin (University of Western Australia). The feeling of friendship: Ekaterina Dashkova’s emotional and literary bonds.

12 October 2016. Miles Ogborn (QMUL). The Deliberative Voice: Speech, Politics and Slavery in the Anglo-Caribbean World.

16 March. Sara Pennell (Greenwich). Nothing of Importance ever happened in a Kitchen.

2 March. Hannah Barker (Manchester). Tradesmen in Love.

3 February. Matthew McCormack (Northampton). Tall histories: height and Georgian masculinities.

2015

9 December. Colin Jones (QMUL). Maximilien Robespierre and a Life in a Day of the French Revolution.

25 November. John Barrell (QMUL). ‘The Meeting of the Waters’.

4 November. Rowan Boyson (KCL). The olfactory imagination: smell, materialism and metaphor in the eighteenth century.

28 October. Farid Azfar (Swarthmore College, PA). Regions of the Ship: Assiento Capitalism and the Floating Island of Portobello.

14 October. Tita Chico (University of Maryland, College Park). Bad Science: A Literary History.

25 March. Melanie Bigold (University of Cardiff). ‘The theatre of the book’: marginalia and mise en page in the Cardiff Rare Books Restoration Drama Collection.

28 January. Nicole Pohl (Oxford Brookes University). Of Balloons and Foreign Worlds: Mary Hamilton’s Utopianism.

2014

3 December. Stephen Daniels (Nottingham). Picturing London: John Britton’s topographical imagination 1800-1840.

19 November. Chris Evans (University of South Wales). Guinea rods and voyage iron: metals in the Atlantic slave trade, their European origins and African impacts.

22 October. Finola O’Kane (University College Dublin). Reversing the Route: Counter-Revolutionary Tours of post-1798 Ireland.

12 February. Michèle Cohen (Richmond University in London and the Institute of Education, University of London). ‘A Passion for Colloquial Discussion’: conversation and education at home in the long-eighteenth century.

29 January. Karen Harvey (Sheffield). Men of Parts: The Erotics and Politics of the Male Leg in Eighteenth-Century England.

15 January. Mark Salber Phillips (Carleton University, Ottowa). Reconsidering Historical Distance.

2013

4 December. David Lambert (Warwick). Credibility and Truth Making in the Atlantic World.

20 November. Mary Fairclough (York). See! From her shrine electric incense rise / Hark! Freedom echoes thro’ the vaulted skies: Electrical science and revolutionary feeling.

13 March 2013. Tony LaVopa (North Carolina State University). David Hume in Paris: Reading a Friendship.

27 February. Naomi Tadmor (Lancaster). The nuclear hardship hypothesis: an eighteenth-century case study.

13 February. John Barrell (QMUL). ‘I know where that is’: the place of Edward Pugh.

30 January. Malcolm Baker (UC Riverside). Celebrating the Illustrious: Roubiliac, Newton, Handel and Pope.

2012

21 November. Charles Walton (Yale). The Fall from Eden: The Free-Trade Origins of the French Revolution.

10 October. Charles Saumarez-Smith (Royal Academy) with Mark Hallett (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art). The Company of Artists’: On the Origins of the Royal Academy of Arts.

7 March. Natasha Eaton (UCL). Subaltern Colour: Art and Colonialism in India.

8 February. Jon Mee (Warwick). ‘Mutual intercourse’ and ‘licentious discussion’ in The Microcosm of London, 1808-1811.

25 January. Bridget Orr (Vanderbilt). ‘All form’d by custom’: Voltaire, Toleration and Oriental Tragedy in the 1730s.

2011

2 November. Quintin Colville (National Maritime Museum).‘Navy, Nation and Nelson’: representing the eighteenth century at the National Maritime Museum.

2 March. Hannah Greig (York). ‘All together and all distinct’: Sociability, Social Exclusivity and the Divided Public in London Pleasure Gardens.

23 February. Swati Chattopadhyay (UC Santa Barbara). Traverse, territory and the ecological uncanny.

26 January. Jessica Riskin (Stanford University). Emotional and Other Adventures of Mr Machine.

Seminars 2017–2021

2021

6 April. Michael J. Griffin (Limerick). ‘London Irish: Goldsmith’s “Retaliation” Revisited’.

5 May. Elin Jones (Exeter). ‘The Mechanical Warship: Naval Seamanship and Useful Knowledge in the Eighteenth Century’.

19 October. Nicole Aljoe (Northeastern). 'Racing the Rise of the Novel, 1688-1832’.

30 November. David O'Shaughnessy (NUI Galway). ‘Accounting for Taste: the Business of Georgian Theatre’.

2020

3 March. James Morland (QMUL). The Sadness of Care: Solitude and Eighteenth-Century Physician Poets. 

11 February. Tess Somervell (Leeds). The Doubting Plowman: Climate and Contingency in Eighteenth-Century Georgic Poetry.

28 January. Hannah Williams (QMUL). Artists’ Things: Material Cultures of the Paris Art World.

2019

29 October. Sophie Gee (Princeton). Communion, Communication and Sacrifice in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones.

15 October. Robbie Richardson (Kent). Unwitnessing Meaning: British Understandings of Wampum in the Eighteenth Century.

1 October. Penelope Corfield (RHUL and Newcastle). Change within Change: The Decline of the Deep Bow/Curtsey and the Rise of the Egalitarian Handshake in Eighteenth-Century Britain.

26 March. Naomi Billingsley (Manchester/John Rylands Research Institute). Extra-Illustrating the Macklin Bible.

12 March. Dror Wahrman (Hebrew University of Jerusalem). The prince, the jeweller and the mogul: on the paradoxes of an early modern object.

29 January. Chloe Wigston-Smith (University of York). Women’s Work and the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World.

2018

4 December. Anne Thell (National University of Singapore). Resisting the Sovereignty of Sight in Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands (1775).

6 November. Karen Harvey (Birmingham). What is a Material History of the Body?

23 October. Innes Keighren (RHUL). The forgotten lives of William Macintosh in the Age of Revolution: from Caribbean planter to traveller in India; from spy in France to exile in Germany.

9 October. Rebecca Spang (Indiana University, Bloomington). Brothers without Fraternity: Male Sibling Relations and the French Revolution.

8 June. Suvir Kaul (University of Pennsylvania). Apostrophe as a Theory of History.

24 April. Kathleen Murphy (Cal Poly). Searching for Goliath: Dru Drury, Insect Collecting and the Eighteenth-Century British Slave Trade.

20 February. Hilary Davidson (University of Sydney). Dress and dressmaking: Regency ribbons and replicas.

6 February. Mark Philp (Warwick). Resisting politics in the 1790s.

30 January. Jean-Jacques Courtine (University of Auckland and l’Université Paris-Sorbonne). The Theatre of Monsters in eighteenth-century Paris: an Archaeology of Curiosity.

23 January 2018. Sarah Easterby-Smith (St Andrews). Seeds of knowledge: a microhistory of colonial science at the end of the French old regime. 

2017

12 December. Peter de Bolla (Cambridge). Distributional Concept Analysis.

3 November. Alice Dolan (QMUL). Touching Linen: Textiles, Emotion and Bodily Intimacy in England c. 1708-1818.

17 October. Jessica Patterson (QMUL). Mughals, Maharajas and the East India Company: Col. Alexander Dow’s (1735-1779) assessment of Religion and Empire.

22 May. Anne Vila (University of Wisconsin). Solitude and [Dis]order: Perspectives from Eighteenth-Century French Literature and Medicine.

28 February. Norma Clarke (Kingston). Goldsmith and his Biographers: ‘a really English worthy’ or ‘Irish if you will’.

31 January. Rosalind Carr (East London). ‘A Landscape of Feeling’? Politeness, Violence and Masculinity in early New South Wales, c.1788-1815.

17 January. Stephen Bending (Southampton). Pleasure Gardens and the Problems of Pleasure c.1650-1830.

 

 

Seminars 2011–2016

2016

26 October. Katrina O’Loughlin (University of Western Australia). ‘The feeling of friendship’: Ekaterina Dashkova’s emotional and literary bonds.

12 October 2016. Miles Ogborn (QMUL). The Deliberative Voice: Speech, Politics and Slavery in the Anglo-Caribbean World.

16 March. Sara Pennell (Greenwich). Nothing of Importance ever happened in a Kitchen.

2 March. Hannah Barker (Manchester). Tradesmen in Love.

3 February. Matthew McCormack (Northampton). Tall histories: height and Georgian masculinities.

2015

9 December. Colin Jones (QMUL). Maximilien Robespierre and a Life in a Day of the French Revolution.

25 November. John Barrell (QMUL). ‘The Meeting of the Waters’.

4 November. Rowan Boyson (KCL). The olfactory imagination: smell, materialism and metaphor in the eighteenth century.

28 October. Farid Azfar (Swarthmore College, PA). Regions of the Ship: Assiento Capitalism and the Floating Island of Portobello.

14 October. Tita Chico (University of Maryland, College Park). Bad Science: A Literary History.

25 March. Melanie Bigold (University of Cardiff). ‘The theatre of the book’: marginalia and mise en page in the Cardiff Rare Books Restoration Drama Collection.

28 January. Nicole Pohl (Oxford Brookes University). Of Balloons and Foreign Worlds: Mary Hamilton’s Utopianism.

2014

3 December. Stephen Daniels (Nottingham). Picturing London: John Britton’s topographical imagination 1800-1840.

19 November. Chris Evans (University of South Wales). ‘Guinea rods’ and ‘voyage iron’: metals in the Atlantic slave trade, their European origins and African impacts.

22 October. Finola O’Kane (University College Dublin). Reversing the Route: Counter-Revolutionary Tours of post-1798 Ireland.

12 February. Michèle Cohen (Richmond University in London and the Institute of Education, University of London). ‘A Passion for Colloquial Discussion’: conversation and education at home in the long-eighteenth century.

29 January. Karen Harvey (Sheffield). Men of Parts: The Erotics and Politics of the Male Leg in Eighteenth-Century England.

15 January. Mark Salber Phillips (Carleton University, Ottowa). Reconsidering Historical Distance.

2013

4 December. David Lambert (Warwick). Credibility and Truth Making in the Atlantic World.

20 November. Mary Fairclough (York). ‘See! From her shrine electric incense rise / Hark! Freedom echoes thro’ the vaulted skies’: Electrical science and revolutionary feeling.

13 March 2013. Tony LaVopa (North Carolina State University). David Hume in Paris: Reading a Friendship.

27 February. Naomi Tadmor (Lancaster). The nuclear hardship hypothesis: an eighteenth-century case study.

13 February. John Barrell (QMUL). ‘I know where that is’: the place of Edward Pugh.

30 January. Malcolm Baker (UC Riverside). Celebrating the Illustrious: Roubiliac, Newton, Handel and Pope.

2012

21 November. Charles Walton (Yale). The Fall from Eden: The Free-Trade Origins of the French Revolution.

10 October. Charles Saumarez-Smith (Royal Academy) with Mark Hallett (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art). ‘The Company of Artists’: On the Origins of the Royal Academy of Arts.

7 March. Natasha Eaton (UCL). Subaltern Colour: Art and Colonialism in India.

8 February. Jon Mee (Warwick). ‘Mutual intercourse’ and ‘licentious discussion’ in The Microcosm of London, 1808-1811.

25 January. Bridget Orr (Vanderbilt). ‘All form’d by custom’: Voltaire, Toleration and Oriental Tragedy in the 1730s.

2011

2 November. Quintin Colville (National Maritime Museum).‘Navy, Nation and Nelson’: representing the eighteenth century at the National Maritime Museum.

2 March. Hannah Greig (York). ‘All together and all distinct’: Sociability, Social Exclusivity and the Divided Public in London Pleasure Gardens.

23 February. Swati Chattopadhyay (UC Santa Barbara). Traverse, territory and the ecological uncanny.

26 January. Jessica Riskin (Stanford University). Emotional and Other Adventures of Mr Machine.

Conferences 2015–2020

17–18 May 2018. ‘Representations of  “Europeanness” in the long eighteenth century’, a two-day international symposium, held in QMUL Arts2 organised by Soile Ylivuori (Newton Fellow in History/University of Helsinki) .There papers by QMUL ECRs alongside those by academics from Manchester, Sussex, UCL, and the Hakluyt Society. The key note lecture was given by Professor Kathleen Wilson (Stony Brook University). The event also saw the launch of a new research network entitled the ‘Colonial-spaces-network’.

14 June 2017. ‘Animating the Archive’ a one-day Research Workshop, in collaboration with the Centre for Enlightenment Studies at KCL. This workshop celebrated and responded to the publication of James Delbourgo’s book Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane (Penguin, 2017. The book examines Sloane’s career from his background in Ulster to his voyage to Jamaica and his creation of a network of collectors who gathered curiosities for him throughout the world, through to the foundation of the British Museum in 1753, the first national public museum in the world. It draws on the histories of science, medicine and collecting, as well as Caribbean, imperial and global histories, and is based on extensive research in Sloane’s surviving specimens, objects, manuscripts and catalogues in London’s Natural History Museum, the British Museum and the British Library. Participants: James Delbourgo (Rutgers), Richard Drayton (KCL), Anne Goldgar (KCL), Colin Jones (QMUL), AnnaMaerker (KCL), Miles Ogborn (QMUL), Elizabeth Eger (KCL), Kim Sloan (British Museum), Julianne Nyhan (UCL), and Victoria Pickering (QMUL). 

29 March 2017. ‘QMCECS ECR Day-Conference on the History of Celebrity’, a one-day conference hosted by the Institute of Historical Research, London. Organised by Anaïs Pedron (QMUL). Keynote – Prof. Antoine Lilti (Paris, EHESS). Participants include:  Ariane Fichtl (University of Augsburg/Université Charles de Gaulle Lille 3), Gabriel Wick (QMUL), Blake Smith (Northwestern University/EHESS, Paris),  Chris Haffenden (Uppsala University),  Jessica Hamel-Akré (University of Montreal),  Meagan Mason (University of Southern California), Lewis Hughes (Lancaster University), Holly Grout (University of Alabama),  Thibaut Casagrande (Ecole Normale Supérieure, Lyon and Université Paris Sorbonne).

6 July 2015. ‘Collections in Use’, a one-day symposium on how early modern scholars showcase their work across a variety of collections, which took place at the Anatomy Lecture Theatre, KCL, organised by  Victoria Pickering (QMUL) and Alice Marples (KCL).

5 June 2015. ‘Beyond the Coffee House: Masculinities and Social Spaces in the Long Eighteenth Century’, organised by Elin Jones (QMUL), and hosted at QMUL. This event had 10 speakers drawn from the UK and Europe, and was sold out to attendees.  

PhD Completions 2017–2020

Antonia Brodie, ‘Noblemen and the Domestic Interior in England, 1660-1714’ (Lindsay Boynton Studentship).

Georgia Haseldine, ‘Portraiture and the campaign for radical reform’. (AHRC CDP with National Portrait Gallery).

Stephanie Howard-Smith, ‘The Cultural History of the Lap-Dog’.

Elin Jones, ‘Masculinity, Materiality and Space Aboard the Royal Navy Ship, 1756-1815’, (AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award with the National Maritime Museum).

Anna Kretschmer, ‘Theatrical Spaces in Eighteenth-century London’. (QMRS)

Ruth Mather, ‘Plebeian Politics and Plebeian Homes’

Victoria Pickering, ‘Putting Nature in a Box: Hans Sloane’s “Vegetable Substance” Collection’ (AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Programme Award with the Natural History Museum).

Nydia Pineda, ‘Selenography: Lunar Cartography 1630-1700’ (QMRS and Mexican Science Foundation).

Hannah Stockton, ‘The Thames as Imperial Design Object’ (AHRC CDP with National Maritime Museum).

Tim Riding, ‘Producing Space in the English East India Company’s Western Presidency, 1612–1780’ (QMUL Principal’s studentship).

Gabriel Wick, ‘Dissident Landscapes: Garden Design, Oppositional Politics and Aristocratic Identity in France, 1770-1781’.

 

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