Seminar 34

Stephanie O’Rourke

Wednesday 17 April 2024, 16:00

Stephanie O’Rourke is a historian of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century visual culture in Europe and its colonial networks, particularly in relation to scientific knowledge, environmental history, and media technologies. She is a Senior Lecturer in art history at the University of St. Andrews.

Upside Down: Mining the Late Eighteenth-Century Landscape

This paper moves across the visual culture of mining infrastructure and volcanic eruptions to explore the emergence of a newly “extractive” way of picturing landscape in late eighteenth-century Europe. Moving across examples from Germany, France, and Britain, I explore how these images encoded emerging ideas about waste, natural resources, verticality, and circulation that would become core to the protocols of extractive capitalism.

Seminar 32

Cindy Ermus

Tuesday, 5 December 2023

Cindy Ermus is Director of Medical Humanities and Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She specializes in the history of medicine and the environment, especially disease epidemics and disasters, in eighteenth-century France and the Atlantic World. She has also published on digital history and the historical profession. She is the author of The Great Plague Scare of 1720: Disaster and Diplomacy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press, 2023), and Urban Disasters (Cambridge UP, 2023). Her next book, co-authored with Claire Edington (UCSD), is a global history of epidemics. Beyond her research and teaching, she is co-founder and executive editor for the open-access, peer-reviewed publication Age of Revolutions (ageofrevolutions.com).

Crisis and Contagion: Researching Disease and Disaster in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

COVID-19. Deadly fires. Devastating storms and floods. Record-breaking heatwaves. Our current era of crisis, driven in many ways by human-caused climate change, has led many to search for historical parallels that could help us better understand the complicated present. For this talk, historian and disaster studies specialist Cindy Ermus (Department of History, University of Texas at San Antonio) will reflect on her experience researching disease and disasters from the eighteenth century to today. With a focus on her two recent books, The Great Plague Scare of 1720 (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and Urban Disasters (Cambridge UP, 2023), she will reflect on the subject of historical crises and on some of the lessons they can offer as we confront a new age of disaster—one that continues to unfold and yield more questions than answers. 

Seminar 30

Ian Calvert

Thursday, 19 October 2023

Ian Calvert is Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature at the University of Bristol. His research focuses on the literary afterlives of classical texts across the long eighteenth century, and takes a particular interest in epic, translation, and allusion. He has published a number of articles on these topics in The Review of English Studies, Translation and Literature, The International Journal of the Classical Tradition, and elsewhere. His book, Virgil's English Translators, Civil Wars to Restoration, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2021. He is currently working on edition of Pope's Homer translations for The Oxford Edition of the Writings of Alexander Pope.

Intervening in Pope’s Homer

In this talk, I outline Pope’s practice of incorporating lines and phrases from an extremely wide range of texts into his translations of Homer. I examine what the presence of these other voices in the poem, who include writers that Pope criticised as hacks and dunces as well as those who he admired and emulated, can tell us about his working methods as a translator. I subsequently consider whether or not Pope expected readers other than himself to recognise his borrowings in the translation, and how this question might inform the level of detail to which, in the interests of preserving readerly interest (and editorial sanity), the edition of Pope’s Homer that I am currently working towards should provide regarding the alterations he made to the Greek original.

Seminar 29

David Veevers

Friday, 12 May 2023

David Veevers is a Lecturer in Early Modern History at Bangor University, having previously been a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London, and a postdoctoral associate at the University of Kent. His research focuses on the history of the early modern British Empire, with a particular emphasis on the East India Company in Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His new book, The Great Defiance: How the World Took on the British Empire, was published by Penguin in May 2023.

Rethinking the Emergence of the Early Modern British Empire, 1500 – 1750

This paper sketches a grand narrative of early modern British colonial expansion, arguing that English colonial enterprises tended to offer a degree of subordination to the non-European and Indigenous polities they encountered. By forming durable diplomatic, commercial, and even cultural links, the English sought to legitimise their presence and realise their political and commercial interests without recourse to violence. When the latter did happen, the English were almost always defeated or contained by their non-European hosts. This paper ultimately argues for the resilience, success, and power of the Indigenous and non-European polities and societies that found themselves in the cross-hairs of Anglo-British colonial expansion in the early modern period, attempting to reinterpret a grand narrative of empire from one of conquest to one of defiance and ultimately resistance.

Seminar 27

Mariam Wassif

Tuesday, 23 May 2023

(rescheduled from March due to UCU action)

Mariam Wassif's work focuses on rhetoric, race, and material culture in the long eighteenth century and Romanticism. Her new book project, “Poisoned Vestments”: Rhetoric and Material Culture in Britain and France, 1660-1820, identifies an encounter between ancient rhetoric and commercial modernity across the canonical genres of the period. She has published essays and articles on everything from Emma to Polidori's Vampyre and has edited a collection of new essays on The Woman of Colour.

“The Disordered Cosmos”: Classical Rhetoric in Mansfield Park and Phillis Wheatley Peters

This talk traces classical figures in Austen’s Mansfield Park and the poetry of Phillis Wheatley Peters as they coincide with representations of race and racialization. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the emerging discipline of classics along with the rediscovery of Greek and Roman artefacts in Europe, and classical education was still the norm in both Jane Austen’s England and Wheatley Peters’s British America. The cultural heritage of ancient Greece and Rome—at the level of both aesthetics and politics—was increasingly seen as the foundation of ordered European “civilization” and, indeed, of whiteness. This essay examines how Mansfield Park and poems by Wheatley Peters such as “Thoughts on the Works of Providence” manifest race-making as part of this effort to impose a cosmic and cosmetic order that remains elusive. By analyzing rhetorical figures that reflect on the fugitive nature of figuration itself, the essay contends that these texts show how the ordering principles of “civilization” to be forces of ungovernable chaos.

Seminar 25

Nora Nachumi & Steffi Oppenheim

Monday 12th December

Nora Nachumi is Associate Professor of English and coordinator of the minor in Women’s Studies at Stern College for Women/Yeshiva University. She is the author of Acting Like a Lady: British Women Novelists and the Eighteenth-Century Stage and has published essays and book chapters on female novelists, playwrights, pedagogy, and film, including two recent essays on Austen and adaptation co-authored with Stephanie Oppenheim. She is also co-editor of Making Stars: Biography and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Jane Austen, Sex, and Romance: Engaging with Desire in the Novels and Beyond, with Kristina Straub and Stephanie Oppenheim, respectively.

Stephanie Oppenheim is Associate Professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, the City University of New York. She has published articles on Jane Austen, pedagogy, and gender. She is co-editor, with Nora Nachumi, of Jane Austen, Sex, and Romance: Engaging with Desire in the Novels and Beyond. Other recent work with Nora Nachumi includes the essays, “Was It Good For You?: Sex, Love and Austen” and, “Lady Susan and Love & Friendship: Laughter, Satire, and the Impact of Form.”

Jane Austen, Sex, and Romance

The recognition of the erotic potential of Austen’s novels, and the exponential growth of fan culture and creativity, have opened new lines of inquiry in the academy that have altered the shape of Austen studies. Jane Austen, Sex, and Romance: Engaging with Desire in the Novels and Beyond is at the vanguard of this emerging field. It is the first collection of essays to bring together academic and popular perspectives to explore how different types of readers experience the realm of desire and the erotic in all things Austen. In this collection, writers, critics, journalists, and authors of internet content weigh in on sex and romance in Austen's works and in the conversations and creations the novels inspire—from sequels to critical analyses to online role-playing games. Written in a variety of styles, the essays explore what is at stake for different sets of Austen enthusiasts when Eros is added to the equation.

In this talk, co-editors Nora Nachumi and Stephanie Oppenheim focus on the on the collaborative processes informing the book. They discuss the genesis of the collection (twenty years in the making) and the ways it evolved over time; the challenges of navigating academic and non-academic communities and publishers; and the unexpected benefits of collaborating with a wide range of contributors to bring this provocative conversation into print.

Seminar 14

Travis Chi Wing Lau, Kenyon College

Thursday 16th September 2021

Cripping Enlightenment, Cripping Progress

Before the rise of the hard sciences and the professionalization of medicine, the eighteenth century witnessed intense debates over the definition of the human, which radically shifted how bodies were understood and ultimately valued. Preceding the eugenic thinking of the nineteenth century that reified the binary of normal and abnormal were embodied concepts of deformity and debility attached to race, gender, class, and sexuality. Essential to the progress narrative of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment was the concept of improvement. As a slow, progressive movement toward betterment or even perfection, “improvement” underpinned major shifts in social governance, commercial industry, and theories of the human. Disability studies in turn has rightly critiqued improvement in relation to eugenics and the medical model, which frames human “improvement” in terms of the cure or elimination of disability and impairment all together. Disability too often has been the unruly remnant of what refuses to be improved. Yet, as eighteenth-century scholars like Helen Deutsch, Felicity Nussbaum, Chris Mounsey, and David Turner have demonstrated, disability as a concept during the Enlightnement was in flux and frequently “subsumed under other categories, notably deformity and monstrosity.” While my talk examines how eighteenth-century novels and poetry figure disability as tragedy or failure, I ultimately make the case that attending to the Enlightenment unsettles an otherwise deterministic model of disability as ever-moving toward oppression and pathology. By looking at disabled life-writing in this period by writers like William Hay, I consider how forms of disability flourishing challenged and reimagined the very terms of improvement that animated Enlightenment progress.

Seminar 12

James Robert Wood, University of East Anglia

Wednesday 23rd June 2021

Anne Finch’s Perplexing Form

“The Mind being itself invisible,” observes Deane Bartlett in The Guardian, “there is no other way to discern its Existence, than by the Effects which it produceth.” Even our own minds are as invisible to ourselves as the minds of others are to us. Anne Finch’s “The Spleen” wrestles with the problems posed by the mind’s invisibility, not least the problem of giving form to that which has no visual shape. This general problem of giving form to the mind becomes acute in the case of the person caught in the throes of the spleen, a condition that, as it is presented in Finch’s poem, is inseparable from the compulsion to impose form on the apostrophized spleen, a condition that nevertheless evades all efforts to “fix thee to remain in one continued Shape” and comprehend “thy perplexing Form.” “The Spleen” offers an array of shapes through one might understand the disease: the irregular shape of the bodily organ known as the spleen, the tangled “perplexity” of vessels and fibres that connect the organ to the body as a whole, as well as the irregular shape that the poem itself. None of these prove capable of grasping this “Proteus to abus’d Mankind.”

My talk places “The Spleen” in two contexts: first the efforts of physicians and anatomists to trace the material underpinnings of mental processes and second contemporary debates over the status of “form” in literary studies. I suggest that these contexts might speak to each other more than we might expect. Just as the mental state known as the spleen seems to retreat from the determinations of form, the literary object retreats from attempts to identify its form (for example) with its visual shape, the arrangement of its parts, or its verbal and phonetic patterns, even as it retains a stubbornly unspecifiable “perplexing form.” “The Spleen” offers contemporary critics a model for a way of thinking about form, without the expectations that forms can always be figured as tangible shapes or that they allow one structure to be understood by way of another.

Seminar 10

Madeleine Pelling, University of York

17th March 2021

Digging Up the Past: Contested Territories and Women Archaeologists in 1780s Britain and Ireland

This paper unpacks the gender, political and material implications of archaeological excavations carried out by Elizabeth Rawdon, Countess of Moira (1731-1808) and Catherine Downes (dates unknown) in 1780s Ireland and England, respectively. Locating their endeavours within increasingly contested territories (in terms of the landscapes in which their enquires took place and the scholarly spaces in which they were reported), I ask why and how women disbarred from all-male knowledge institutions turned instead to developing archaeological practice in order to contribute historiographically. For the Countess, whose Dublin salon hosted Anglo-Irish antiquaries interested in a Celtic past, the discovery of a bog body on her husband’s land became part of a wider programme in legitimizing her own socio-political position. Similarly, for Downes, the careful prioritising of Roman archaeology over the remains of an Ancient British burial at Warminster spoke to contemporary discourses in which the Roman occupation became a desirable colonial model. In both cases, remains had first been discovered by local agricultural workers before being disseminated in elite circles, setting this work against backdrop of mounting tensions around land enclosure and occupation. From Downes’ comparison of Roman pottery fragments with ‘Mr. Wedgwood’s teapots,’ to the Countess’s linking of clothing preserved on the bog body to her efforts to revive Ireland’s textile industry, I examine these women’s historical interpretation through subterranean and contemporary objects, as well as the political implications in bringing the past to the surface.

Seminar 8

Joseph Hone, Newcastle University

21st January 2021

Secrets, Lies and Title Pages

‘Was there ever such a time of scribble in England?’ groaned John Tutchin in 1705. ‘Such vast numbers of papers issued from the press weekly, most of ’em convicted of being libels in the very frontispiece, or title page, without either author, printer or publisher’s name to ’em.’ Manufacturers of eighteenth-century books were supposed to put their names on title pages. This ‘imprint’ was both a convention and a legal requirement. But, as Tutchin noted, printers often broke the law. This paper will explore how the printers of controversial tracts corrupted title pages with false names, dates, and places. Such falsehoods were most often used to disguise the origins of dangerous books or piracies, or even to incriminate professional rivals. Equally, though, certain names, dates, and places held certain resonances and could help a reader to situate a work within a broader ideological context. From this perspective, the imprint presented a subtle means of transforming a polemical or satirical text into a ‘mock book’. This paper will make the case for a bibliographically-informed literary criticism, illustrate the dangers of accepting eighteenth-century imprints at face value, and show how paying attention to the precise phrasing of an imprint can transform our understanding of particular literary and political texts.

Seminar 6

Rebecca Anne Barr, University of Cambridge

14th October 2020

The Good Man on trial, or, male virginity and the politics of misogyny

In Sir Charles Grandison, or, The Good Man (1754), Samuel Richardson created a character who was not merely a good Christian gentleman, but also attractive and worth emulation – and a virgin until marriage. Throughout eighteenth-century literature, and beyond, fictions which appear to follow women’s desires and narrative are undergirded by the prompts and prerogatives of male heterosexuality. This talk examines the rhetorical power of male virginity in making ‘good men’ and the gendered politics of such representations. In this deliberately partial genealogy, I argue that male virginity is a key constituent of an intrinsically reactionary arsenal of public virtue. In these case studies militant forms of manly exceptionalism are used in order to subordinate women and to halt virtue’s perceived ‘feminine drift’. From Milton to Grandison, from Jane Eyre’s St John Rivers to the 2018 testimony of Supreme Judge Brett Kavanaugh, I argue that literature’s male virgins have a peculiarly misogynist anger at their core.

Seminar 4

Freya Gowrley,

University of Derby

15th July 2020

Anna Seward and the Poetics of Exchange: Portraiture, Poetry and Gift Culture

This paper unpacks the complex networks of emotional, artistic, and poetic exchange that surrounded a highly emotional portrait-object: a printed version of George Romney’s painting Serena given to Lady Eleanor Butler (1739-1829) and Sarah Ponsonby (1755-1831)—the so-called ‘Ladies of Llangollen’—by the poet Anna Seward (1742-1809). Seward identified the image as a ‘perfect similitude’ of her deceased step-sister Honora Sneyd, so much so that the print played an active role in Seward’s commemoration of their lost friendship. Like Butler and Ponsonby’s own infamous ‘romantic friendship’, Seward and Sneyd enjoyed an intensely close and deeply affectionate relationship that flouted social norms, with both Sneyd’s marriage to Richard Edgeworth in 1751, and her eventual death in 1780, devastating the poet.

Discussing both Seward’s copy of the print, as well as Butler and Ponsonby’s facsimile, this paper places the image within two contexts: firstly, in relation to Seward’s volume of poetry, Llangollen Vale with Other Poems (1796), a sentimentalising series of verses dedicated to Seward’s intimate relationships with Butler, Ponsonby, and Sneyd; and secondly, within an intricate display of gifted portraits at Plas Newydd, Butler and Ponsonby’s home at Llangollen in Wales. Using methodologies from the history of the emotions, material culture and literary studies, and art history it will demonstrate the image’s deep embedment within Seward’s emotional and creative consciousness: on the one hand, allowing Seward to actively ruminate and comment upon her close connections with Sneyd, Butler, and Ponsonby; and on the other, functioning within a dynamic web of literary, material, and loving gestures enacted between Seward and her friends. In so doing, the paper will highlight the vibrant intermedial lives of this eighteenth-century print, and the urgency of an interdisciplinary approach to the art of this period.

Seminar 2

Eugenia Zuroski, McMaster University

18 May 2020

Haywood’s fascinum

Eliza Haywood’s The Adventures of Eovaai is a curiously elaborate joke: an intricate oriental romance as vehicle for a relatively straightforward satire of Robert Walpole and his political ascendance. As Ros Ballaster has observed, the tale contains “anarchic and perverse comic energies” that tend to overwhelm, even counteract, the story’s political orientations. In this paper, I consider how, in its more anarchic and perverse moments, Eovaai theorizes “unseriousness” as an epistemological and political approach to the world—an unexpected utopian promise in the prospect of being “carried away” by literature’s most fascinating and least plausible objects. Tracing Haywood’s engagement with the Roman fascinum, I show the unexpected conceptual heights a well-deployed penis joke might take us.