QMCECS and the QMCECS seminar has a new website. Please click through to the new site.

https://www.qmul.ac.uk/sed/english/research/centres/qmcecs/events/events

All are welcome to the seminar and all our events, which are online at present.

Three notices from QMCECS for February 2020

Seminar 25 Feb cancelled

Due to the forthcoming UCU industrial action against pension cuts, casualisation and the race and gender pay gap, the QMCECS will cancel Gillian Russell’s seminar that was scheduled for 25 February.

Gillian was due to speak on ‘‘Jane Austen’s Newsmen: fugitive mediality in Persuasion’ and we look forward to rescheduling her seminar in the summer term.

Next seminar: 3 March 2020

3 March 2020: James Morland (QMUL Solitude Project): ‘The Sadness of Care: Solitude and Eighteenth-Century Physician Poets’ (Chair: Barbara Taylor)

Venue: 5-7pm: ArtsTwo 2.17, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End, London, E1 4NS.

(QMUL UCU is not taking industrial action in this week, so the seminar will continue).

CFP: The Prospect of Improvement: the Bluestocking Landscape

A two-day conference at Hagley Hall, Worcestershire including a tour of the house and grounds
8-9th September 2020

Organised by The Elizabeth Montagu Correspondence Online project. Proposals for papers by Feb 24 2020.

Call for papers

What was the ideological link between landscape improvement and moral reform in the eighteenth century? Our conference puts centre stage the patriotism and patronage of George Lyttelton first baron Lyttelton (1709-1773), especially his extensive landscaping of his grounds and commissioning of local architect Sanderson Miller (1716-1780) in designing a new Hagley Hall. How does this project compare with the ideas of other landscape reformers from the midlands such as Sir Uvedale Price (1747-1829) and William Shenstone (1714-1763)? As EMCO is editing the correspondence of Lord Lyttleton’s friend and literary collaborator, critic Elizabeth Montagu (1718-1800), we will equally focus on eighteenth-century women’s management of estates, commissioning of art and architecture and writing associating rural retirement with moral improvement. We invite delegates to participate in 3 panels on concepts of reform and improvement in architecture and rural life; on female management of the country estate; and on the symbolism of the garden in eighteenth-century art and literature. We also welcome papers on Whig perceptions of the country and the city; portraiture, representations of the country house and landscape painting; bluestocking crafts and collecting; botany, gardening and girls’ education; agricultural reform and the rural poor; the Lunar Society, provincial salons and correspondence networks; the politics of patronage; philanthropy and the religious revival; domesticating the picturesque: creating the grotto, the wilderness and the waterfall.

Tuesday 11 February 2020

Tess Somervell (Leeds)

The Doubting Plowman: Climate and Contingency in Eighteenth-Century Georgic Poetry

The genre of georgic, which enjoyed a renaissance in the eighteenth century, is usually defined as poetry about agriculture and/or labour. But for many readers and writers in this period, weather was the key emblematic theme of georgic. This talk traces the georgic across the long eighteenth century, from Milton’s ‘careful Plowman’ in Book IV of Paradise Lost, through the formal georgics of the mid-century, to Wordsworth’s juvenile translations of Virgil’s Georgics, to ask why georgic was viewed as the ideal genre for weather-writing. In a period when the new science of meteorology asked difficult questions about humans’ capacity to understand the nonhuman world, the georgic form allowed poets to portray the weather as something predictable but ultimately unknowable.

Chair: Will Bowers

All welcome

Time: 5.00-7.00pm.

Venue: Location: ArtsTwo 2.17, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End, London, E1 4NS.

[Travel instructions: take the Central Line or District Line to Mile End. Exit the tube station, turn left down Mile End Road, crossing the Burdett Road/Grove Road intersection, passing under the Mile End Green Bridge and over the canal, to the campus entrance at Westfield Way. Turn first Entering campus here, turn first left, pass along the back of ArtsOne, the Law building and the Novo cemetery, to find ArtsTwo, the School of History building]

Convenors: Prof Markman Ellis, English (m.ellis@qmul.ac.uk); Prof Colin Jones, History (c.d.h.jones@qmul.ac.uk); Prof Miles Ogborn, Geography (m.j.ogborn@qmul.ac.uk); Prof Amanda Vickery, History (a.vickery@qmul.ac.uk); Prof Barbara Taylor, English and History (b.g.taylor@qmul.ac.uk); Dr Will Bowers, English (will.bowers@qmul.ac.uk); Dr Hannah Williams, History (hannah.williams@qmul.ac.uk).

QMCECS Seminar: Semester 2 2020

Tuesday 28 January 2020

Hannah Williams

(History, QMUL)

Artists’ Things: Material Cultures of the Paris Art World

What stories can ‘things’ tell about themselves and their owners? Exploring the potential of things as the subjects and objects of history, Hannah Williams will discuss the book she is writing with Katie Scott about the material possessions that once belonged to eighteenth-century French artists. Delving into the spaces of artists’ homes and studios, this project unearths the objects that formed the fabric of artists’ lives, professional and personal, and looks for an alternative history of the Paris art world in its material culture. Tracing how things were acquired, how they circulated, and how their owners related to them, the book is written as a series of ‘object biographies’ that attend to the agency of inanimate things and their crucial role in mediating human interactions and facilitating social activities.

Chair: Colin Jones

All welcome

Time: 6.00-8.00pm.

Venue: Location: ArtsTwo 2.17, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End, London, E1 4NS.

Convenors: Prof Markman Ellis, English (m.ellis@qmul.ac.uk); Prof Colin Jones, History (c.d.h.jones@qmul.ac.uk); Prof Miles Ogborn, Geography (m.j.ogborn@qmul.ac.uk); Prof Amanda Vickery, History (a.vickery@qmul.ac.uk); Prof Barbara Taylor, English and History (b.g.taylor@qmul.ac.uk); Dr Will Bowers, English (will.bowers@qmul.ac.uk); Dr Hannah Williams, History (hannah.williams@qmul.ac.uk).

Due to industrial action the seminar planned for 26 November 2019 has been postponed. A revised calendar of seminars is attached below.

Semester Two 2019-20

28 January 2020: Hannah Williams (QMUL), ‘Artists’ Things: Material Cultures of the Paris Art World’ (Chair: Colin Jones)

11 February 2010: Tess Somervell (Leeds): ‘The Doubting Plowman: Climate and Contingency in Eighteenth-Century Georgic Poetry’ (Chair: Will Bowers)

25 February 2020: Gillian Russell (York) [title tba]

10 March 2020: James Morland (QMUL Solitude Project) ‘The Sadness of Care: Solitude and Eighteenth-Century Physician Poets’ (Chair: Barbara Taylor)

24 March 2020: Stephanie O’Rourke (St Andrews), ‘Forest Histories’ (Chair: Hannah Williams)

Time: 5.00-7.00pm (please note our return to usual time-slot)

Location: ArtsTwo 2.17, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End, London, E1 4NS

Convenors: Prof Markman Ellis, English (m.ellis@qmul.ac.uk); Prof Colin Jones, History (c.d.h.jones@qmul.ac.uk); Prof Miles Ogborn, Geography (m.j.ogborn@qmul.ac.uk); Prof Amanda Vickery, History (a.vickery@qmul.ac.uk); Prof Barbara Taylor, English and History (b.g.taylor@qmul.ac.uk); Dr Will Bowers, English (will.bowers@qmul.ac.uk); Dr Hannah Williams, History (hannah.williams@qmul.ac.uk).

Travel instructions: take the Central Line or District Line to Mile End. Exit the tube station, turn left down Mile End Road, crossing the Burdett Road/Grove Road intersection, passing under the Mile End Green Bridge and over the canal, to the campus entrance at Westfield Way. Turn first Entering campus here, turn first left, pass along the back of ArtsOne, the Law building and the Novo cemetery, to find ArtsTwo, the School of History building.

29 October 2019

Sophie Gee (Princeton)

Communion, Communication and Sacrifice in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones

(Chair: Markman Ellis)

Professor Sophie Gee is in the English Department at Princeton University, where she specializes in eighteenth-century British Literature in global and imperial perspectives. She is the author of Making Waste: Leftovers and the Eighteenth-Century Imagination (2009), about the period’s obsession with things discarded, and a critically acclaimed novel, The Scandal of the Season, a comedy of manners that retells the scandal behind Pope’s ‘The Rape of the Lock’. She is currently completing a new monograph, entitled The Eucharist and the Rise of the Novel.

Time: Semester One: 6.00-8.00pm. Note change from our usual time.

Location: ArtsTwo 2.17, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End, London, E1 4NS.

Convenors: Prof Markman Ellis, English (m.ellis@qmul.ac.uk); Prof Colin Jones, History (c.d.h.jones@qmul.ac.uk); Prof Miles Ogborn, Geography (m.j.ogborn@qmul.ac.uk); Prof Amanda Vickery, History (a.vickery@qmul.ac.uk); Prof Barbara Taylor, English and History (b.g.taylor@qmul.ac.uk); Dr Will Bowers, English (will.bowers@qmul.ac.uk); Dr Hannah Williams, History (hannah.williams@qmul.ac.uk).

[Travel instructions: take the Central Line or District Line to Mile End. Exit the tube station, turn left down Mile End Road, crossing the Burdett Road/Grove Road intersection, passing under the Mile End Green Bridge and over the canal, to the campus entrance at Westfield Way. Entering campus here, turn first left, pass along the back of ArtsOne, the Law building and the Novo cemetery, to find ArtsTwo, the School of History building].

Tuesday 15 October 2019

Robbie Richardson

(University of Kent)

Unwitnessing Meaning: British Understandings of Wampum in the Eighteenth Century

For British writers in the eighteenth century, wampum, or shell beads strung or woven together and highly valued in Native American societies, was a perplexing material. As both text and commodity, sacred pact and ornament, wampum conflated European systems of meaning. This paper will look at various interpretations of wampum in periodicals, histories, treatises on writing, and novels, as well as in museum guides and visual culture, and will assess the epistemological challenges it placed on a society in which the lines between finance and culture were becoming increasingly blurred. It will additionally look to more recent work by book historians and Indigenous scholars to understand how historical objects from First Nations societies can be “read” today.

Chair: Miles Ogborn

All welcome

Time: 6.00-8.00pm.

Venue: Location: ArtsTwo 2.17, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End, London, E1 4NS.

Convenors: Prof Markman Ellis, English (m.ellis@qmul.ac.uk); Prof Colin Jones, History (c.d.h.jones@qmul.ac.uk); Prof Miles Ogborn, Geography (m.j.ogborn@qmul.ac.uk); Prof Amanda Vickery, History (a.vickery@qmul.ac.uk); Prof Barbara Taylor, English and History (b.g.taylor@qmul.ac.uk); Dr Will Bowers, English (will.bowers@qmul.ac.uk); Dr Hannah Williams, History (hannah.williams@qmul.ac.uk).

1 October 2019

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

This presentation develops Penelope Corfield’s earlier research into the history of inter-personal greetings. Etiquette books offered rules for formal behaviour but are not good guides to casual encounters. Instead, broad trends can be detected from evidence in letters, plays, novels and travelogues. The deep bow from men was slowly turning into nod and brief touch of hand to head; the deep curtsey from women was translating into a quick bob. Yet the long eighteenth-century in Britain saw not only change – but change within change. A new style of greeting, in the form of the egalitarian handshake, was quietly emerging. This presentation analyses the causes, timings, and meanings of these innovations.

Chair: Amanda Vickery

Time: Semester One: 6.00-8.00pm. Note change from our usual time.

Location: ArtsTwo 2.17, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End, London, E1 4NS.

Convenors: Prof Markman Ellis, English (m.ellis@qmul.ac.uk); Prof Colin Jones, History (c.d.h.jones@qmul.ac.uk); Prof Miles Ogborn, Geography (m.j.ogborn@qmul.ac.uk); Prof Amanda Vickery, History (a.vickery@qmul.ac.uk); Prof Barbara Taylor, English and History (b.g.taylor@qmul.ac.uk); Dr Will Bowers, English (will.bowers@qmul.ac.uk); Dr Hannah Williams, History (hannah.williams@qmul.ac.uk).

[Travel instructions: take the Central Line or District Line to Mile End. Exit the tube station, turn left down Mile End Road, crossing the Burdett Road/Grove Road intersection, passing under the Mile End Green Bridge and over the canal, to the campus entrance at Westfield Way. Turn first Entering campus here, turn first left, pass along the back of ArtsOne, the Law building and the Novo cemetery, to find ArtsTwo, the School of History building].

All welcome.

Please forward this blog post to anyone who might be interested.

1 October 2019: Penelope Corfield (RHUL): ‘Change within Change: The Decline of the Deep Bow/Curtsey and the Rise of the Egalitarian Handshake in Eighteenth-Century Britain’ (Chair: Amanda Vickery)

15 October 2019: Robbie Richardson (Kent): ‘Unwitnessing Meaning: British Understandings of Wampum in the Eighteenth Century’ (Chair: Miles Ogborn)

29 October 2019: Sophie Gee (Princeton): ‘Communion, Communication and Sacrifice in Tom Jones’ (Chair: Markman Ellis)

26 November 2019: Tess Somervell (Leeds): ‘The Doubting Plowman: Climate and Contingency in Eighteenth-Century Georgic Poetry’ (Chair: Will Bowers)

Time: Semester One: 6.00-8.00pm. Note change from our usual time.

Location: ArtsTwo 2.17, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End, London, E1 4NS.

Semester Two

28 January 2020: Hannah Williams (QMUL)

25 February 2020: Gillian Russell (York)

10 March 2020: James Morland (QMUL Solitude Project)

24 March 2020: Stephanie O’Rourke (St Andrews)

Titles to be confirmed. 5.00-7.00pm.

Convenors: Prof Markman Ellis, English (m.ellis@qmul.ac.uk); Prof Colin Jones, History (c.d.h.jones@qmul.ac.uk); Prof Miles Ogborn, Geography (m.j.ogborn@qmul.ac.uk); Prof Amanda Vickery, History (a.vickery@qmul.ac.uk); Prof Barbara Taylor, English and History (b.g.taylor@qmul.ac.uk); Dr Will Bowers, English (will.bowers@qmul.ac.uk); Dr Hannah Williams, History (hannah.williams@qmul.ac.uk).

Travel instructions: take the Central Line or District Line to Mile End. Exit the tube station, turn left down Mile End Road, crossing the Burdett Road/Grove Road intersection, passing under the Mile End Green Bridge and over the canal, to the campus entrance at Westfield Way. Turn first Entering campus here, turn first left, pass along the back of ArtsOne, the Law building and the Novo cemetery, to find ArtsTwo, the School of History building.