About us
The Eighteenth-Century Research Group, founded in 2009, looks at a wide variety of media across Europe in the eighteenth century. Co-ordinated by staff from the School of Arts, the group brings together researchers from various departments across Birkbeck to collaborate and foster dialogue across disciplinary specialisations.
In addition to regular conferences and public lectures, there is a termly reading group which provides opportunities to read and discuss work-in-progress in a friendly interdisciplinary environment.
Group co-ordinators (School of Arts)
- Luisa Calè (English and Humanities). Research: visual culture; literary adaptation; collecting; spectatorship; the book as gallery/the book as archive; Blake and extra-illustration.
- Ann Lewis (Cultures and Languages). Research: the representation of prostitutes in 18th-century France; the relationship of text and image (especially illustrations to eighteenth-century novels); sensibility and the novel.
- Kate Retford (History of Art and Screen Media). Research: British portraiture, esp. the conversation piece; gender; the country house collection; art as historical evidence.
- Emily Senior (English and Humanities). Research: British and Atlantic intercultural encounters; literature, science and medicine, natural history and the novel.
Other members
- James Arnold (History, Classics and Archaelogy). Research: Opera in the French Revolution
- Stephen Brogan (History, Classics and Archaeology). Research: the royal touch in early modern England; magic, science and religion in the Spectator papers; Chevalier D’Eon
- Anne Byrne (History, Classics and Archaeology). Research: 18th-century French history, particularly court history; the court of Louis XVI, ritual and ceremony, participation, gender
- Michael Dobson (English and Humanities). Research: British and American theatre history; reception of Shakespeare; authorship; national identity; J.P. Kemble and theatrical authority; non-professional Shakespeare performance; W.H. Ireland and his forgeries.
- Natalya Elliot (English and Humanities). Research: Dreaming and the occult imagination from Blake to Yeats
- Piyel Haldar (Law). Research: law, orientalism and postcolonialism; the place of animals in literary and legal discourse
- Richard Hamblyn (English and Humanities). Research: science and humanities; environmental writing.
- Robin Howells (Cultures and Languages). Research: late 18th-century French and English literature and culture; the rise of the family; neo-classicism; the Gigantic in the late 18th century
- Joy Hudson (English and Humanities). Research: spectatorship in the works of Frances Burney; the Warren Hastings trial.
- Alex Mackintosh (London Consortium). Research: the development of the modern slaughterhouse and the ‘humane’; early anthropology; critical theory
- Victoria McNeil (English and Humanities). Research: urban space, esp. London, and its material evolution and representation; London squares
- Julie Peakman (History, Classics and Archaeology). Research: Sex, gender and sexualities, medicine, erotica and the book trade, prostitution (British and Worldwide), whore biographies.
- Anna Richards (Cultures and Languages). Research: German women's writing from the 18th century to the present day; psychological and medical history and the novel.
- Julian Swann (History, Classics and Archaelogy). Research: The political and cultural history of the French court, noble elites and development of the French state, 1660-1790
- Carol Watts (English and Humanities). Research: Laurence Sterne, empire and global war; the culture of loyalist refugees in America during and following the revolutionary wars.