2nd Week. 19 October: Dr Daniel Cook (University of Bristol)
‘Collectors vs. Printers: John Nichols's Swiftiana’
4th Week. 2 November: Dr Giles Bergel (Merton College, University of Oxford)
‘A Genealogy of the English Ballad Trade: The Wandering Jew's Chronicle 1634-1820’
6th Week. 16 November. Dr Jennie Batchelor (University of Kent)
‘Invisible Labours and the Writing of Women's Literary History’
8th Week. 30 November. Dr David Taylor (University of Cambridge)
‘The Politico-Dramatic Manager: Sheridan and the possibility of a
radical Theatre Royal’
Monday, 19 October 2009
Tuesday, 13 October 2009
Bards to Banville - seminar of interest to Restoration to Reform members
Bards to Banville: An Irish Literature Seminar
Wednesday 14 October, 5.15 pm
The Old Library, Hertford College, Oxford
Professor David Womersley (St Catherine’s College, Oxford)
'The Art of Political Trapanning: Swift on the Cause, Curse and Cure of Party'
All are welcome. Drinks will follow.
Convenors: thomas.walker@lincoln.ox.ac.uk, sarah.bennett@hertford.ox.ac.uk
Friday, 15 May 2009
Trinity Term 2009
4th Week. 18 May: Rosemary Dixon (Queen Mary, University of London)
'Reconfigurations of Knowledge in the Eighteenth-Century Novel.'
6th Week. 1 June: Jonathan Lamb (Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee)
‘Characters, Persons, Authors: Fictionality and the Novel.’
Special Meeting in conjunction with the Besterman Centre for the Enlightenment
NOTE CHANGE OF VENUE: 5.15 pm at THE VOLTAIRE ROOM, TAYLOR INSTITUTE LIBRARY
8th Week. 15 June. Kirsty Milne (Magdalen College, Oxford)
'Kensington Garden and Vanity-Fair: Bunyan's Eighteenth-Century Makeover'
'Reconfigurations of Knowledge in the Eighteenth-Century Novel.'
6th Week. 1 June: Jonathan Lamb (Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee)
‘Characters, Persons, Authors: Fictionality and the Novel.’
Special Meeting in conjunction with the Besterman Centre for the Enlightenment
NOTE CHANGE OF VENUE: 5.15 pm at THE VOLTAIRE ROOM, TAYLOR INSTITUTE LIBRARY
8th Week. 15 June. Kirsty Milne (Magdalen College, Oxford)
'Kensington Garden and Vanity-Fair: Bunyan's Eighteenth-Century Makeover'
Sunday, 11 January 2009
2nd Week. 26 January: Prof. Alexis Tadié (Professor of English Literature, University of Paris-Sorbonne)
'Reconfigurations of Knowledge in the Eighteenth-Century Novel.'
In this paper, I would like to examine some aspects of the relationship between fiction and knowledge. Although the nature of this relationship is well documented, and includes the inventory of scientific sources in literary texts, studies of influence, studies of representations of science in fiction, I think this relationship can be investigated further. Recent accounts have for instance helped understand the work of literature in a scientific context, highlighting the contribution of the former to the advancement of learning. Some scholars, especially in the context of studies of the republic of letters, have analysed the relationships developed between ‘literary’ and ‘scientific’ scholars. This paper aims at offering a contribution to the ongoing dialogue, looking not so much at representations of knowledge, but at the ways in which fiction may be said to appropriate, rework and reconfigure knowledge. I will first investigate the relationship between fiction and encyclopedia, hoping to highlight the ways in which the construction of fiction can, at times, follow the lines of the encyclopedia. I will then look at how fiction may accommodate scientific endeavours, looking at a specific example of art and technique, namely the automaton. This will lead me to think about the ways in which fiction experiments with objects and inventions. I will finally concentrate on the idea of fiction as thought experiment.
Alexis Tadié is Professor of English Literature at the University of Paris-Sorbonne. Prior to taking up this position, he was director of the Maison Française d’Oxford and a Fellow by special election of St Catherine’s College, Oxford. His most recent book is Sterne’s Whimsical Theatres of Language (Ashgate, 2003).
4th Week. 9 February: Dr Gillian Dow (Chawton Research Fellow, University of Southampton)
'French Bards and Anglo-American Reviewers.'
It is increasingly acknowledged by scholars that the literature of France and England developed side by side in the long eighteenth century, and that the novel in particular started life as a cross-channel production. Historians have estimated that between 1750 and 1830, over 10 per cent of English publications were translations, and in the closing decades of the late eighteenth century, translations from the French saw a considerable literary vogue. This paper will examine the reception of some of these translations from the French in the Anglo-American periodical press.
Gillian Dow is a Research Fellow in English at the University of Southampton and is responsible for the academic programme at Chawton House Library, an independent research library with a collection of women's writing, 1660-1830. She is a graduate of the University of Glasgow and a former Snell Exhibitioner at Balliol College, where she researched her DPhil in the Modern Languages Faculty. She is interested in the cross-channel migration of ideas (and in particular educational theories) in the period 1780-1830. Her work to date has focused on both French and British women writers in that period.
6th Week. 23 February: Prof. Barbara M. Benedict (Charles A. Dana Professor of English Literature, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut)
'Seeing and Superstition: Practising Empiricism in Early-Modern Collections.'
Museums became fashionable sites for looking at things in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, just as collecting books became possible for the middling classes. What was the significance of the objects in museums, of collecting books, or indeed of collecting at
all? And how were the things in collections, and the collection itself, regarded? This essay argues that, as European travel burgeoned, collecting became a national passion for the early-modern British, and encountering collections of both natural and cultural objects becomes a means for spectators to see "science": to imitate and to mock the empirical acts of knowledge of the early collector or virtuoso, or scientist. Seeing the things in the early museum and collecting books made "scientific" knowledge part of modern identity, and this seeing was organized and documented in the literatures of travel and collecting, and put on display in museums ranging from the revered to the ridiculous.
The museum and the library hold particular cultural importance during the early-modern period because of the conjunction of three, hugely important cultural changes. The first is the advent of empiricism as, not merely a philosophy, but a practice, and the second is the explosion of consumer objects and spectacular events in Britain. Both of these stamped objects with a new authority and glamor. The third is the rise of nationalism, which made collecting and also writing in the vernacular patriotic enterprises. While objects and collecting have evoked ambivalence from very early in Western history, these three cultural developments intensified the ambiguity enveloping the significance, meaning and value of collections of things. Paula Findlen has recently argued that unusual, even fraudulent, objects were "fully integrated" into the classic curiosity cabinet; however, the persistent, early-modern satire and caricature directed at curiosity cabinets suggests instead that the inclusion of objects, especially objects that breached conventional classifications, endangered the authority of the entire enterprise. Indeed, Claire Preston notes that mockery of "cataloguing, encyclopaedism, experimental philosophy and souvenir- or trophy-hunting" clashed with conventionally text-centered humanist culture, and so "made the antiquary's and the experimentalist's interest in things, rather than in books or manuscripts, difficult to assimilate into the prevailing model of learning." This difficulty, however, also made collecting and observing collections a prime mode for the dramatization of an emerging identity: one symbiotically national and individual. By analyzing the travelogue of Thomas Coryat, the diary and museum catalogue of the virtuoso Ralph Thoresby, the guidebooks of the British Museum, and the catalogues of the popular museums in London, this talk will argue that early-modern museums and libraries made the very practice of looking to learn problematic.
Barbara Benedict is Charles A. Dana Professor of English at Trinity College, Hartford, where she specializes in eighteenth-century literature and culture. Her recent monographs include Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago, 2001), Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literary Anthologies (Princeton, 1996), and Framing Feeling: Sentiment and Style in English Prose Fiction, 1745-1800 (New York, 1994).
8th Week. 9 March: Prof. Alan Downie (Professor of English, Goldsmiths University of London)
'Taking the Long View on the Eighteenth-Century Novel.'
To confine consideration of 'the eighteenth-century novel' to the century between 1701 and 1800 is misleading and unhelpful. The emergence of the novel as a recognized and recognizable form took place within the 'long' eighteenth century. If, instead of searching for the 'origins' or the 'rise' of the novel, the entire process were to be turned the other way round, and we were to work backwards from the point at which the cultural hegemony of the novel in Britain unquestionably obtained, then there would be less risk of our giving undue prominence to unrepresentative examples. That point was not reached with the publication of a particular novel in a particular year, because the making of the English novel is a process, and the terminus ad quem should be placed around 1820.
Alan Downie is Professor of English at Goldsmith’s University of London, where he has taught since 1978. His research interests include: literature and politics during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the history of the book; and the early novel. He is a member of the advisory boards of Literature Compass, The Scriblerian and Swift Studies and an editor of Pickering and Chatto’s Eighteenth-Century Political Biographies series, for which he has recently completed A Political Biography of Henry Fielding. He has published extensively on a wide variety of writers, including Christopher Marlowe, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift and Jane Austen.
'Reconfigurations of Knowledge in the Eighteenth-Century Novel.'
In this paper, I would like to examine some aspects of the relationship between fiction and knowledge. Although the nature of this relationship is well documented, and includes the inventory of scientific sources in literary texts, studies of influence, studies of representations of science in fiction, I think this relationship can be investigated further. Recent accounts have for instance helped understand the work of literature in a scientific context, highlighting the contribution of the former to the advancement of learning. Some scholars, especially in the context of studies of the republic of letters, have analysed the relationships developed between ‘literary’ and ‘scientific’ scholars. This paper aims at offering a contribution to the ongoing dialogue, looking not so much at representations of knowledge, but at the ways in which fiction may be said to appropriate, rework and reconfigure knowledge. I will first investigate the relationship between fiction and encyclopedia, hoping to highlight the ways in which the construction of fiction can, at times, follow the lines of the encyclopedia. I will then look at how fiction may accommodate scientific endeavours, looking at a specific example of art and technique, namely the automaton. This will lead me to think about the ways in which fiction experiments with objects and inventions. I will finally concentrate on the idea of fiction as thought experiment.
Alexis Tadié is Professor of English Literature at the University of Paris-Sorbonne. Prior to taking up this position, he was director of the Maison Française d’Oxford and a Fellow by special election of St Catherine’s College, Oxford. His most recent book is Sterne’s Whimsical Theatres of Language (Ashgate, 2003).
4th Week. 9 February: Dr Gillian Dow (Chawton Research Fellow, University of Southampton)
'French Bards and Anglo-American Reviewers.'
It is increasingly acknowledged by scholars that the literature of France and England developed side by side in the long eighteenth century, and that the novel in particular started life as a cross-channel production. Historians have estimated that between 1750 and 1830, over 10 per cent of English publications were translations, and in the closing decades of the late eighteenth century, translations from the French saw a considerable literary vogue. This paper will examine the reception of some of these translations from the French in the Anglo-American periodical press.
Gillian Dow is a Research Fellow in English at the University of Southampton and is responsible for the academic programme at Chawton House Library, an independent research library with a collection of women's writing, 1660-1830. She is a graduate of the University of Glasgow and a former Snell Exhibitioner at Balliol College, where she researched her DPhil in the Modern Languages Faculty. She is interested in the cross-channel migration of ideas (and in particular educational theories) in the period 1780-1830. Her work to date has focused on both French and British women writers in that period.
6th Week. 23 February: Prof. Barbara M. Benedict (Charles A. Dana Professor of English Literature, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut)
'Seeing and Superstition: Practising Empiricism in Early-Modern Collections.'
Museums became fashionable sites for looking at things in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, just as collecting books became possible for the middling classes. What was the significance of the objects in museums, of collecting books, or indeed of collecting at
all? And how were the things in collections, and the collection itself, regarded? This essay argues that, as European travel burgeoned, collecting became a national passion for the early-modern British, and encountering collections of both natural and cultural objects becomes a means for spectators to see "science": to imitate and to mock the empirical acts of knowledge of the early collector or virtuoso, or scientist. Seeing the things in the early museum and collecting books made "scientific" knowledge part of modern identity, and this seeing was organized and documented in the literatures of travel and collecting, and put on display in museums ranging from the revered to the ridiculous.
The museum and the library hold particular cultural importance during the early-modern period because of the conjunction of three, hugely important cultural changes. The first is the advent of empiricism as, not merely a philosophy, but a practice, and the second is the explosion of consumer objects and spectacular events in Britain. Both of these stamped objects with a new authority and glamor. The third is the rise of nationalism, which made collecting and also writing in the vernacular patriotic enterprises. While objects and collecting have evoked ambivalence from very early in Western history, these three cultural developments intensified the ambiguity enveloping the significance, meaning and value of collections of things. Paula Findlen has recently argued that unusual, even fraudulent, objects were "fully integrated" into the classic curiosity cabinet; however, the persistent, early-modern satire and caricature directed at curiosity cabinets suggests instead that the inclusion of objects, especially objects that breached conventional classifications, endangered the authority of the entire enterprise. Indeed, Claire Preston notes that mockery of "cataloguing, encyclopaedism, experimental philosophy and souvenir- or trophy-hunting" clashed with conventionally text-centered humanist culture, and so "made the antiquary's and the experimentalist's interest in things, rather than in books or manuscripts, difficult to assimilate into the prevailing model of learning." This difficulty, however, also made collecting and observing collections a prime mode for the dramatization of an emerging identity: one symbiotically national and individual. By analyzing the travelogue of Thomas Coryat, the diary and museum catalogue of the virtuoso Ralph Thoresby, the guidebooks of the British Museum, and the catalogues of the popular museums in London, this talk will argue that early-modern museums and libraries made the very practice of looking to learn problematic.
Barbara Benedict is Charles A. Dana Professor of English at Trinity College, Hartford, where she specializes in eighteenth-century literature and culture. Her recent monographs include Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago, 2001), Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literary Anthologies (Princeton, 1996), and Framing Feeling: Sentiment and Style in English Prose Fiction, 1745-1800 (New York, 1994).
8th Week. 9 March: Prof. Alan Downie (Professor of English, Goldsmiths University of London)
'Taking the Long View on the Eighteenth-Century Novel.'
To confine consideration of 'the eighteenth-century novel' to the century between 1701 and 1800 is misleading and unhelpful. The emergence of the novel as a recognized and recognizable form took place within the 'long' eighteenth century. If, instead of searching for the 'origins' or the 'rise' of the novel, the entire process were to be turned the other way round, and we were to work backwards from the point at which the cultural hegemony of the novel in Britain unquestionably obtained, then there would be less risk of our giving undue prominence to unrepresentative examples. That point was not reached with the publication of a particular novel in a particular year, because the making of the English novel is a process, and the terminus ad quem should be placed around 1820.
Alan Downie is Professor of English at Goldsmith’s University of London, where he has taught since 1978. His research interests include: literature and politics during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the history of the book; and the early novel. He is a member of the advisory boards of Literature Compass, The Scriblerian and Swift Studies and an editor of Pickering and Chatto’s Eighteenth-Century Political Biographies series, for which he has recently completed A Political Biography of Henry Fielding. He has published extensively on a wide variety of writers, including Christopher Marlowe, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift and Jane Austen.
Tuesday, 30 September 2008
Symposium on the Life and Works of Eliza Haywood: New Directions - Monday of 4th Week, 3rd November
The Restoration to Reform meeting for 4th Week this term will take the form of a special symposium on Eliza Haywood's life and works. Professor Ros Ballaster, Dr. Rebecca Bullard, and Professor Kathryn King will all give papers to be followed by discussion. This event will, of course, be of special interest to those working on early modern women writers, but especially to those students studying Haywood for FHS Paper 7 this term.
For further details on the speakers see this terms schedule, below.
Monday, 29 September 2008
Programme for Michaelmas Term 2008
2nd Week. 20 October: Dr Sarah Pearsall, Oxford Brookes University
'Dr. Madman's “Hellish Arts”: Polygamy Controversies of the 1780s.'
Dr. Pearsall focuses on early American history, as well as early modern North Atlantic and Caribbean history. She is especially concerned with the interconnections between Atlantic and Caribbean Anglophone colonization, settlement, and revolution in the early modern era, and issues of gender, the family, sexuality, and the household. Her next project, provisionally entitled 'More Wives Than One': Early American Polygamy, 1600-1840, traces the means by which the marital structure of polygamy, and the place and labour of women, became enmeshed with cultural and racial critiques in various locations of the Atlantic (and the Mediterranean and Pacific) worlds.
4th Week. 3 November: Professor Ros Ballaster, Mansfield College, University of Oxford; Dr Rebecca Bullard, Merton College, University of Oxford; Professor Kathryn King, University of Montevallo
'Symposium on the Life and Works of Eliza Haywood: New Directions' (poster)
Professor Ballaster’s main research interests lie in seventeenth and eighteenth century culture, oriental fiction, women's writing, critical theory, contemporary popular/mass culture. Her best known works include Seductive Forms: Women's Amatory Fiction 1640-1740 (1992) and the more recent Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662-1785 (2005 – winner of the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize from the British Academy) and an accompanying anthology Fables of the East (2005). Professor Ballaster is currently editing volume 4 of a 10 volume History of British Women's Writing from Palgrave Macmillan (General Editors: Cora Kaplan and Jennie Batchelor). This volume concerns 1690-1750, and is due for publication early 2010.
Dr. Bullard is Junior Research Fellow at Merton College, University of Oxford. Her first monograph is a study of the 'secret history', a polemical form of historiography which flourished in England during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Entitled The Politics of Disclosure, 1674–1725: Secret History Narratives, it will be published by Pickering & Chatto in May 2009. Dr. Bullard’s other current research projects are respectively concerned with Daniel Defoe and secrecy, and the concept of wit during the long seventeenth century.
Professor King edited Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator with Alexander Pettit (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2001) and is the author of Jane Barker, Exile: A Literary Career 1675-1725 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000) and The Poems of Jane Barker: The Magdalen Manuscript (Magdalen College Occasional Paper No. 3. Oxford: Magdalen College, 1998). Professor King is currently working on two book-length studies of Haywood, the first a partly biographical account entitled Men's Place in Haywood's World with sections on Aaron Hill, Savage, Fielding and others, the second a study of her scandal fiction and the beginnings of celebrity voyeurism.
6th Week. 17 November: Dr Tom Jones, University of St Andrews
'Pope, Faction and the Sense of History'
Dr. Jones’s main research interest is in the relationship between theories of meaning and poetry in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, with particular regard to Alexander Pope. His other interests include the history and theory of literary criticism and later eighteenth-century poetry. His monograph, Pope and Berkeley: The Language of Poetry and Philosophy was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2005. Currently, Dr. Jones is working on a general introduction to theories of poetic language, and in the longer term towards a biography of George Berkeley.
8th Week. 1 December: Dr Philip Connell, Selwyn College, Cambridge
‘Natural Philosophy and Political Allegiance in the Poetry of James Thomson'
Dr. Connell’s principal research and teaching interests lie in the period 1660-1847. He is the author of Romanticism, Economics and the Question of 'Culture', which was published by OUP in 2001, and articles on eighteenth and nineteenth-century British literary history. He is currently studying the relations between poetry and politics and religion in the eighteenth century.
'Dr. Madman's “Hellish Arts”: Polygamy Controversies of the 1780s.'
Dr. Pearsall focuses on early American history, as well as early modern North Atlantic and Caribbean history. She is especially concerned with the interconnections between Atlantic and Caribbean Anglophone colonization, settlement, and revolution in the early modern era, and issues of gender, the family, sexuality, and the household. Her next project, provisionally entitled 'More Wives Than One': Early American Polygamy, 1600-1840, traces the means by which the marital structure of polygamy, and the place and labour of women, became enmeshed with cultural and racial critiques in various locations of the Atlantic (and the Mediterranean and Pacific) worlds.
4th Week. 3 November: Professor Ros Ballaster, Mansfield College, University of Oxford; Dr Rebecca Bullard, Merton College, University of Oxford; Professor Kathryn King, University of Montevallo
'Symposium on the Life and Works of Eliza Haywood: New Directions' (poster)
Professor Ballaster’s main research interests lie in seventeenth and eighteenth century culture, oriental fiction, women's writing, critical theory, contemporary popular/mass culture. Her best known works include Seductive Forms: Women's Amatory Fiction 1640-1740 (1992) and the more recent Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662-1785 (2005 – winner of the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize from the British Academy) and an accompanying anthology Fables of the East (2005). Professor Ballaster is currently editing volume 4 of a 10 volume History of British Women's Writing from Palgrave Macmillan (General Editors: Cora Kaplan and Jennie Batchelor). This volume concerns 1690-1750, and is due for publication early 2010.
Dr. Bullard is Junior Research Fellow at Merton College, University of Oxford. Her first monograph is a study of the 'secret history', a polemical form of historiography which flourished in England during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Entitled The Politics of Disclosure, 1674–1725: Secret History Narratives, it will be published by Pickering & Chatto in May 2009. Dr. Bullard’s other current research projects are respectively concerned with Daniel Defoe and secrecy, and the concept of wit during the long seventeenth century.
Professor King edited Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator with Alexander Pettit (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2001) and is the author of Jane Barker, Exile: A Literary Career 1675-1725 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000) and The Poems of Jane Barker: The Magdalen Manuscript (Magdalen College Occasional Paper No. 3. Oxford: Magdalen College, 1998). Professor King is currently working on two book-length studies of Haywood, the first a partly biographical account entitled Men's Place in Haywood's World with sections on Aaron Hill, Savage, Fielding and others, the second a study of her scandal fiction and the beginnings of celebrity voyeurism.
6th Week. 17 November: Dr Tom Jones, University of St Andrews
'Pope, Faction and the Sense of History'
Dr. Jones’s main research interest is in the relationship between theories of meaning and poetry in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, with particular regard to Alexander Pope. His other interests include the history and theory of literary criticism and later eighteenth-century poetry. His monograph, Pope and Berkeley: The Language of Poetry and Philosophy was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2005. Currently, Dr. Jones is working on a general introduction to theories of poetic language, and in the longer term towards a biography of George Berkeley.
8th Week. 1 December: Dr Philip Connell, Selwyn College, Cambridge
‘Natural Philosophy and Political Allegiance in the Poetry of James Thomson'
Dr. Connell’s principal research and teaching interests lie in the period 1660-1847. He is the author of Romanticism, Economics and the Question of 'Culture', which was published by OUP in 2001, and articles on eighteenth and nineteenth-century British literary history. He is currently studying the relations between poetry and politics and religion in the eighteenth century.
Wednesday, 16 April 2008
Programme for Trinity Term 2008
2nd Week. 28th April:
Prof. Michael McKeon (Rutgers University)
"Theory and Practice in Historical Method"
Professor McKeon is the author of The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), which won a Professional and Scholarly Publishing Award given by the Association of American Publishers. He is also the author of the groundbreaking The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (John Hopkins University Press, 1987, 2002), which won the James Russell Lowell Prize, as well as Politics and Poetry in Restoration England (Harvard University Press, 1975). He also edited the anthology Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). In addition, he has published numerous articles on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature and culture and on literary theory and methodology.
4th Week. 12th May:
John McTague (St. Catherine's College)
“‘A Rebel in his Principles’: John Partridge and Swift’s Bickerstaff hoax.”
John McTague is in the second year of a DPhil on the representation of British politics in text between 1678 and 1720, supervised by Dr. Christine Gerrard (Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford). His thesis accounts for the manner in which the constitutional and dynastic turmoil of the mid and late seventeenth century affected the ways in which texts and culture were understood and deployed across this slightly later period.
Stephen Bernard (Brasenose College)
“One word in pencil, five in ink: adventures in twentieth-century scholarship”
Stephen Bernard is the editor of the life and letters of Jacob Tonson the elder, under the supervision of Dr. Abigail Williams (St Peter's College, Oxford), and funded by a Doctoral Award from the AHRC. He teaches in Brasenose College, Oxford - where he is a Senior Scholar - on the early modern period and the long eighteenth century, and has particular interests in the works of Dryden, Swift, Defoe, Pope, and the history of the book. He is the winner of the 2007 Review of English Studies Essay Prize (forthcoming, May 2008), and is a research assistant on the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift, particularly Gulliver's Travels edited by Prof. David Womersley (St. Catherine's College, Oxford) (forthcoming) and the Journal to Stella edited by Dr. Abigail Williams (forthcoming).
6th Week. 26th May:
John West (University of Warwick)
"Dryden's Essays of the 1670's"
John West is a first year PhD student at Warwick researching Restoration literature and politics.
Adam Putz (University of Warwick)
“Reprints and the Repertoire: Shakespeare in Early Eighteenth-Century Dublin”
Adam Putz is a PhD student at the University of Warwick. His research interests include the cultural politics of performing and publishing Shakespeare in Ireland, the development of Irish criticism of Shakespeare, and the influence of Shakespeare on Irish authors. He has also written on James Joyce, including a forthcoming article on Joyce's use of journalism in his short fiction.
8th Week. 9th June:
Claudine van Hensbergen (St. Edmund Hall)
"'Sort your Fictions better, if you wou'd have 'em believ'd': Some reflections on wives, whores and the negotiation of legal discourse within the printed text."
Laurence Williams (Magdalen College)
“Chinese Gardens and the Macartney Embassy”
Prof. Michael McKeon (Rutgers University)
"Theory and Practice in Historical Method"
Professor McKeon is the author of The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), which won a Professional and Scholarly Publishing Award given by the Association of American Publishers. He is also the author of the groundbreaking The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (John Hopkins University Press, 1987, 2002), which won the James Russell Lowell Prize, as well as Politics and Poetry in Restoration England (Harvard University Press, 1975). He also edited the anthology Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). In addition, he has published numerous articles on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature and culture and on literary theory and methodology.
4th Week. 12th May:
John McTague (St. Catherine's College)
“‘A Rebel in his Principles’: John Partridge and Swift’s Bickerstaff hoax.”
John McTague is in the second year of a DPhil on the representation of British politics in text between 1678 and 1720, supervised by Dr. Christine Gerrard (Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford). His thesis accounts for the manner in which the constitutional and dynastic turmoil of the mid and late seventeenth century affected the ways in which texts and culture were understood and deployed across this slightly later period.
Stephen Bernard (Brasenose College)
“One word in pencil, five in ink: adventures in twentieth-century scholarship”
Stephen Bernard is the editor of the life and letters of Jacob Tonson the elder, under the supervision of Dr. Abigail Williams (St Peter's College, Oxford), and funded by a Doctoral Award from the AHRC. He teaches in Brasenose College, Oxford - where he is a Senior Scholar - on the early modern period and the long eighteenth century, and has particular interests in the works of Dryden, Swift, Defoe, Pope, and the history of the book. He is the winner of the 2007 Review of English Studies Essay Prize (forthcoming, May 2008), and is a research assistant on the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift, particularly Gulliver's Travels edited by Prof. David Womersley (St. Catherine's College, Oxford) (forthcoming) and the Journal to Stella edited by Dr. Abigail Williams (forthcoming).
6th Week. 26th May:
John West (University of Warwick)
"Dryden's Essays of the 1670's"
John West is a first year PhD student at Warwick researching Restoration literature and politics.
Adam Putz (University of Warwick)
“Reprints and the Repertoire: Shakespeare in Early Eighteenth-Century Dublin”
Adam Putz is a PhD student at the University of Warwick. His research interests include the cultural politics of performing and publishing Shakespeare in Ireland, the development of Irish criticism of Shakespeare, and the influence of Shakespeare on Irish authors. He has also written on James Joyce, including a forthcoming article on Joyce's use of journalism in his short fiction.
8th Week. 9th June:
Claudine van Hensbergen (St. Edmund Hall)
"'Sort your Fictions better, if you wou'd have 'em believ'd': Some reflections on wives, whores and the negotiation of legal discourse within the printed text."
Laurence Williams (Magdalen College)
“Chinese Gardens and the Macartney Embassy”
Monday, 10 December 2007
Programme for Hilary Term 2008
2nd Week. 21st January: Dr. Daniel Carey (National University of Ireland, Galway)
'Universalism, Diversity, and Enlightenment: From the Eighteenth-Century to Postcolonial Theory'
Dr. Daniel Carey teaches at the University of Ireland, Galway, and is a convenor and project leader of the research project “Borders and Crossings: Travel in Fiction and Fantasy” there, which has yielded publications on topics including Gulliver’s Travels and Asian travel in the Renaissance. He also edits the journal Eighteenth Century Ireland. His research interests include the history of travel and travel writing; natural history; Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson; Irish philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries.
4th Week. 4th February: Dr. Rhodri Lewis (St Hugh's College, University of Oxford)
'William Petty, God, and the order of nature'
Dr. Rhodri Lewis is a fellow of St Hugh’s College, Oxford. His research interests are centred on early modern literary, intellectual and scholarly history, and he is currently at work on a study of the diffusion and decline of the ars memoriae (the so-called “art of memory”) in England and Europe from about 1500-1750. Dr. Lewis is also working on a critical edition of William Petty’s hitherto lost manuscript treatise ‘Of the Scale of Creatures’, and editing volume 5 of the Oxford Francis Bacon. His first book Language, Mind and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke was published this year by Cambridge University Press.
6th Week. 18th February: Dr. Stuart Gillespie (University of Glasgow)
'The Origins and Impact of the Dryden-Tonson Miscellanies'
Dr. Stewart Gillespie teaches at Glasgow University. His interests range from the early modern period to the late eighteenth century, with three overlapping strands: English literary translation, Shakespeare, and the reception of classical literature. He was a founding editor of the journal Translation in Literature, is the joint General Editor of the Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, and co-edited the recent Cambridge Companion to Lucretius.
8th Week. 3rd March: Dr Rebecca Barr (St Peter’s College, University of Oxford)
‘Richardson’s Charles Grandison’.
Dr. Rebecca Barr is lecturer in English at St. Peter’s College, Oxford. Her PhD explored community and subjectivity in the work of the novelist Samuel Richardson through religious and philosophical contexts, and with particular reference to Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees. She is currently working on violence and the politics of the natural sublime in Wordsworth and Niall Griffiths. Her research interests include gender and writing; representations of masculinity; religion and literature; contemporary British and Irish poetry and poetics; critical theory and psychoanalysis.
'Universalism, Diversity, and Enlightenment: From the Eighteenth-Century to Postcolonial Theory'
Dr. Daniel Carey teaches at the University of Ireland, Galway, and is a convenor and project leader of the research project “Borders and Crossings: Travel in Fiction and Fantasy” there, which has yielded publications on topics including Gulliver’s Travels and Asian travel in the Renaissance. He also edits the journal Eighteenth Century Ireland. His research interests include the history of travel and travel writing; natural history; Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson; Irish philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries.
4th Week. 4th February: Dr. Rhodri Lewis (St Hugh's College, University of Oxford)
'William Petty, God, and the order of nature'
Dr. Rhodri Lewis is a fellow of St Hugh’s College, Oxford. His research interests are centred on early modern literary, intellectual and scholarly history, and he is currently at work on a study of the diffusion and decline of the ars memoriae (the so-called “art of memory”) in England and Europe from about 1500-1750. Dr. Lewis is also working on a critical edition of William Petty’s hitherto lost manuscript treatise ‘Of the Scale of Creatures’, and editing volume 5 of the Oxford Francis Bacon. His first book Language, Mind and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke was published this year by Cambridge University Press.
6th Week. 18th February: Dr. Stuart Gillespie (University of Glasgow)
'The Origins and Impact of the Dryden-Tonson Miscellanies'
Dr. Stewart Gillespie teaches at Glasgow University. His interests range from the early modern period to the late eighteenth century, with three overlapping strands: English literary translation, Shakespeare, and the reception of classical literature. He was a founding editor of the journal Translation in Literature, is the joint General Editor of the Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, and co-edited the recent Cambridge Companion to Lucretius.
8th Week. 3rd March: Dr Rebecca Barr (St Peter’s College, University of Oxford)
‘Richardson’s Charles Grandison’.
Dr. Rebecca Barr is lecturer in English at St. Peter’s College, Oxford. Her PhD explored community and subjectivity in the work of the novelist Samuel Richardson through religious and philosophical contexts, and with particular reference to Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees. She is currently working on violence and the politics of the natural sublime in Wordsworth and Niall Griffiths. Her research interests include gender and writing; representations of masculinity; religion and literature; contemporary British and Irish poetry and poetics; critical theory and psychoanalysis.
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