Studies in the Long Eighteenth Century

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Eighteenth-Century Pleasure Garden

Research

The Lady’s Magazine: Understanding the Emergence of a Genre

The Lady’s Magazine: Understanding the Emergence of a Genre is a two-year Leverhulme-funded project that will provide a freely accessible and fully annotated index of the magazine’s contents from its first issue in 1770 to the launch of its new series in 1818. The database will be accompanied by a series of publications in which we interpret the discoveries we have made and the trends we have observed throughout our collation of the data for the index. The project team is based at the University of Kent and is led by Jennie Batchelor. Jennie is working closely with the project’s two full-time Postdoctoral Researchers: Dr Jenny DiPlacidi and Dr Koenraad Claes. Click here to find out more about the project.

Women’s Writing of the Long Eighteenth Century

The Centre is involved in a number of collaborative research projects (events and publications) linked to Chawton House Library and the University of Southampton. With Cora Kaplan, Jennie Batchelor is Co-series editor of Palgrave’s 10-volume History of British Women’s Writing (2010-) and is on the Editorial Board and Co-Series Editor of Pickering and Chatto’s Chawton House Library Series. The Centre also enjoys an ongoing relationship with Godmersham Park Heritage Centre (another big house, with which Jane Austen had close connections) and is participating in an event to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Pride and Prejudice on 8 September 2013.

The Evliya Çelebi Way

Donna Landry was awarded a Leverhulme Study Abroad Fellowship (2009-2010) for ‘Hoofprinting’ to discover what remains of vanished Ottoman worlds. With Ercihan Dilari, Caroline Finkel, and Gerald MacLean, she founded the Evliya Çelebi Way project in 2009, following interlinked itineraries of Ottoman and English travellers, principally those of Evliya Çelebi (1611-c1685). His ten-volume manuscript Seyahatname, or ‘Book of Travels’, entered the UNESCO Memory of the World register in 2013. While researching legacies of the last Islamic empire, the project team pioneered Turkey’s first UNESCO long-distance equestrian cultural route to encourage sustainable tourism and local horse culture. The Evliya Çelebi Way.

British Collections, First Nations Objects

Robbie Richardson’s current research project builds upon a recently completed postdoctoral fellowship in the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at Carleton University. The project investigates British collections of First Nations objects from the eighteenth century and the ways in which Britons encountered and interpreted these items in museums, coffeehouses, and private houses. He has worked with curators from institutions such as the British Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum in conducting research on the provenance and reception of objects and hopes to work collaboratively with various institutions in assembling a database of eighteenth-century Native North American objects.

Event and exhibition to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice

The Centre assisted in the coordination of a series of events at Godmersham Park in  September 2013 to celebrate the anniversary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice. The events and exhibition included a symposium on eighteenth and nineteenth-century periodicals and the rare opening of Godmersham Park (owned by Jane Austen’s brother). Click here to read more about the event.

Visiting Training Fellows

  • Emre Celik (2017), PhD student in the School of History, from the Black Sea Technical University in Trabzon. Emre is working on Ottoman attitudes and policies regarding travellers and tourists.
  • Sherzad Barzani (Sep 2013 – Nov 2013)