New Directions in Eighteenth-Century Studies

11.00–5.00pm on 31 May, 2013

Lock-keeper’s Cottage Graduate Centre, Queen Mary, University of London
Mile End Road, London E14NS
Attendance: Free, followed by drinks
For further details, contact megankitching@gmail.com

Programme

11.00–12.30 Session 1: Envisaging Nature Chair: Markman Ellis

Welcome: Markman Ellis

Nydia Pineda, Queen Mary, University of London

Observing, Inventing and Engraving Moonscapes: Hooke’s Lunar Vale in Micrographia

Megan Kitching, Queen Mary, University of London

Nature’s Volume: the Poem as Encyclopaedia

Killian Quigley, Vanderbilt University

Picturesque Scaffolding: Spectacle, Violence, and the Construction of the English Countryside

12.30–1.30 Lunch

1.30–3.00 Session 2 Self, Mind and Community Chair: Tessa Whitehouse

Tom Williams, Queen Mary, University of London

Imagining the Nation: John Clare and It-Narratives

Joanna Wharton, University of York

Materialising the Mind: Barbauld’s ‘Inventory of the Furniture in Dr. Priestley’s Study’

Richard Stern, Queen Mary, University of London

Cowper’s Stay at Doctor Cotton’s Collegium Insanorum

3.00–3.30 Afternoon Tea

3.30–5.00 Session 3 Objects and Fictions of the Sea Chair: TBC

Miranda Stanyon, Queen Mary, University of London

Fictions of Transport: Translating the Sublime in Psalm 19

Adam Miller, Vanderbilt University

Pocket-Watches and Chronometers: Rethinking the Utilitarian Motives behind Technological Innovation in Eighteenth-Century England

Ruth Scobie, University of York

‘My latest discoveries’: Eighteenth-century circumnavigation and The Last Man.

5.00 Closing Remarks and Drinks

Wed 13 March 2013

Prof Tony LaVopa (North Carolina State University)

‘David Hume in Paris: Reading a Friendship’

The paper explores the intimate (and unlikely) friendship between David Hume and the Comtesse de Boufflers in Paris in 1763-65. It asks what Hume’s imagined life with the Countess might tell us about the strains between his efforts to articulate a new ethos for the Scottish “Middle Station” and his very un-Scottish (and un-English) fondness for the culture of politeness and gallantry in le monde in Paris. Such an inquiry, the paper argues, provides a new angle of approach to one of Hume’s central concerns:  the relationship between Nature and social artifice.

Time: 5.00-7.00pm

Venue: Seminar Room, Lock-Keepers Cottage Graduate Centre, 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 Barbara Taylor, English and History (b.g.taylor@qmul.ac.uk); Prof Amanda Vickery, History (a.vickery@qmul.ac.uk).

[Travel instructions: Central Line or District Line to Mile End. Exit tube station, turn left down Mile End Road, cross Burdett Road, go under the Mile End Green Bridge (a large yellow bridge), over the canal, and the college is on the left. Enter East Gate, and the Lock-Keepers Cottage is the second building on the right].

Wed 27 February 2013

Prof Naomi Tadmor  (University of Lancaster)

The nuclear hardship hypothesis: an eighteenth-century case study

Time: 5.00-7.00pm

Venue: Seminar Room, Lock-Keepers Cottage Graduate Centre, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End, London, E1 4NS

This is a regular work-in-progress seminar and there is no pre-circulated paper.

QM Eighteenth-Century Studies Seminar 2012-2013

 Wed 13 February 2013

Prof John Barrell (Queen Mary University of London)

“I know where that is”: the place of Edward Pugh

John Barrell has completed a book on the Welsh artist and writer Edward Pugh, to be published by the University of Wales Press in spring 2013. He has published widely on the literature, history and art of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain, focusing on language, landscape, law, empire, theories of society and progress, and the theory of painting. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the English Association, and has recently joined Queen Mary as Professor of English.

Time: 5.00-7.00pm

Venue: Seminar Room, Lock-Keepers Cottage Graduate Centre, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End, London, E1 4NS

For updates and more information, see our blog: http://qmcecs.wordpress.com/

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 Barbara Taylor, English and History (b.g.taylor@qmul.ac.uk);  Prof Amanda Vickery, History (a.vickery@qmul.ac.uk).

[Travel instructions: Central Line or District Line to Mile End. Exit tube station, turn left down Mile End Road, cross Burdett Road, go under the Mile End Green Bridge (a large yellow bridge), over the canal, and the college is on the left. Enter East Gate, and the Lock-Keepers Cottage is the second building on the right].

Wed 30 January 2013

Prof Malcolm Baker (University of California, Riverside)

Celebrating the Illustrious: Roubiliac, Newton, Handel and Pope

Malcolm Baker will be talking about the issues raised in one chapter of his forthcoming
book, The Marble Index: Roubiliac and Sculptural Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century
Britain. His discussion will concentrate on the third section, dealing with Pope, and
will look forward to a future research project about Pope, authorship and images of
literary celebrity being planned with the Yale Center for British Art.

This paper is pre-circulated: the speaker will present a short introduction to the paper,
followed by general discussion. If you are short of time, read section VII.iii, about
Pope, preceded by the Introduction to the Chapter. The paper can be downloaded from:
<http://bit.ly/10cbEcW>

Time: 5.00-7.00pm

Venue: Seminar Room, Lock-Keepers Cottage Graduate Centre, Queen Mary University of
London, Mile End, London, E1 4NS

For updates and more information, see our blog: http://qmcecs.wordpress.com/

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
Barbara Taylor (English and History); Prof Amanda Vickery, History (a.vickery@qmul.ac.uk).

[Travel instructions: Central Line or District Line to Mile End. Exit tube station, turn
left down Mile End Road, cross Burdett Road, go under the Mile End Green Bridge (a large
yellow bridge), over the canal, and the college is on the left. Enter East Gate, and the
Lock-Keepers Cottage is the second building on the right].

The FELLOWSHIP is open to scholars of the ‘long’ eighteenth century (or any part of it) in any discipline. This award is open to early career researchers: any doctoral student at a British university in their second year of study and above, and any post-doctoral researcher normally resident in Britain, within five years of the award of their PhD. Anyone interested is invited to submit a letter of application, specifying the proposed research, using the form available on the website: http://www.qmul.ac.uk/eighteenthcentury. (Although the form available there is dated 2011, it is fine to use it).

Deadline for applications: 17 January 2012. The award must be taken up in the period February 1 to June 30 (subject to availability of accommodation).

Wed 21 November 2012

Prof Charles Walton (Yale University)

‘The Fall from Eden: The Free-Trade Origins of the French Revolution’

This paper is precirculated: the speaker will present a short introduction to the paper, followed by general discussion. The paper can be downloaded from: <http://bit.ly/UGiKih>

Time: 5.00-7.00pm

Venue: Seminar Room, Lock-Keepers Cottage Graduate Centre, 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 Barbara Taylor (English and History) Prof Amanda Vickery, History (a.vickery@qmul.ac.uk).

[Travel instructions: Central Line or District Line to Mile End. Exit tube station, turn left down Mile End Road, cross Burdett Road, go under the Mile End Green Bridge (a large yellow bridge), over the canal, and the college is on the left. Enter East Gate, and the Lock-Keepers Cottage is the second building on the right].

What did we do on long evenings at home before electricity? Visit our candlelit early period rooms and enjoy a glass of wine before settling down for a special evening of live music, readings, riddles and anecdotes – a taste of how earlier generations entertained themselves at home. To book, contact bookings@geffrye-museum.org.uk or call 020 7739 9893.

Date:  Thursday 15th November 2012

Time: 7.00pm, museum open from 6.00pm

Venue:  The Geffrye Museum, Kingsland Road,  London,  E2 8EA

http://www.geffrye-museum.org.uk/whatson/events/adults/

5.15pm, Tuesday 20 November
ArtsTwo Building, Room 3.16
Queen Mary
Mile End Road E1 4NS

“And he shall purify the Sons of Levi”: A Rereading of Handel’s Messiah. Surprisingly, questions of religious meaning in Handel’s Messiah have been under-explored. This talk will discuss previously unidentified sources for altered readings in the work’s libretto of biblical excerpts, and it will demonstrate how the arrangement of verses and their word choices project Christian schadenfreude toward Judaism. The paper  will go on to show how Handel’s music underscores these tendencies of the libretto and adds to them, reaching a euphoric climax in the Hallelujah chorus.

Michael Marissen is Daniel Underhill Professor of Music at Swathmore College and Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations (Woolf Institute, Cambridge). He has published widely on J.S. Bach, and is the author of The Social and Religious Designs of J. S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos (Princeton) and Lutheranism, anti-Judaism, and Bach’s St. John Passion (Oxford). He is the editor of Creative Responses to Bach from Mozart to Hindemith (Nebraska), and co-author of An Introduction to Bach Studies (Oxford). He is currently working on Handel’s Messiah and Christian triumphalism.

Contact m.e.stanyon[at]qmul.ac.uk with any enquiries.

17 October: Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (1995) [extract] and Sprat, History of the Royal Society(1667) [extract]. Introduction: Tessa Whitehouse

31 October: Steven Shapin, ‘Chapter Three: A Social History of Truth-Telling: Knowledge, Social Practice, and the Credibility of Gentlemen’, in A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 65-125. Introduction: Markman Ellis

14 November: Shelley Trower, ‘Nervous Motions,’ in Senses of Vibration: A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound (New York: Continuum, 2012), pp. 13–37, and Coleridge’s ‘Aeolean Harp’ and ‘This Limetree Bower My Prison’. Introduction: Miranda Stanyon

28 November: Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Zone: New York, 2010) [extract], John Bender and Michael Marrinan, The Culture of Diagram (Stanford University Press, 2010) [extract]. Introduction: Megan Kitching

5 December: Universal languages, John Wilkins and Paula Findlen on Athanasius Kircher [tbc]. Introduction: Nydia Pineda.

Further details and readings will be circulated in advance of each meeting. To receive reminders and reading material, contact Megan Kitching (megankitching[at]gmail.com) or Nydia Pineda (nydia_pda[at]hotmail.com).
We hope to see you there.