We are delighted to announce this year’s Visiting Fellows, who will join us over three Cohorts, each spending a month in the Library to work on their research projects.
The Fellowships are awarded to postgraduate and early career researchers whose work promises a significant contribution to scholarly communities and has the potential to generate lively public engagement. There were many strong applications this year, so we would like to congratulate those selected, and very much look forward to working with them, and gaining new perspectives on our collections from their research.
These Fellowships have been made possible by a generous donation from the Ardeola Charitable Trust.
Summer Cohort
Rose McKean, University of York
As a visiting fellow at Chawton House, I intend to consult a number of rare texts that are essential to my ongoing research on Romantic-period Gothic chapbooks. Specifically, the work of two women who approached the chapbook trade from differing perspectives: prolific author Sarah Scudgell Wilkinson and pioneering publisher Ann Lemoine. Gothic chapbooks developed as a form of popular literature during the late eighteenth century, granting an expanding readership of the middle, working and labouring classes unprecedented access to Gothic narratives. With their elaborate frontispieces and experimental interweaving of disparate influences, materials and styles, the Gothic chapbooks developed by Lemoine and Wilkinson paved the way for nineteenth century reinventions both of street literature and the Gothic. The rich archive at Chawton House provides a rare opportunity to interact with this material directly. I intend to pay particular attention to the visual and material dimensions of the chapbook, using text-image studies to re-centre the art of the illustrator. I hope to contribute a focus on working class women’s literature, interrogating the relationship between gender, the chapbook’s commercial aims and the diverse and creative output of two remarkable women.
Eliza Holmes, Harvard, Massachusetts USA
In my time as a Visiting Fellow at Chawton House, I will continue work on a project on the presence of agricultural labor in nineteenth century literature, and a second project, “Rural Women,” that grew out of the first. In it, I am exploring the relationship between the domestic and agricultural labor that many British women writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were engaged in alongside their literary work. While we tend to separate out garden books, diaries and cookbooks from literary art, this project will investigate the ways in which these forms overlap and inform each other. Through the materials (commonplace books, cookbooks, novels and agricultural documents), as well as the resources of the garden and estate, that exist at Chawton House, I will explore the form, genre, and material circumstances of cookbooks and household guides, and read rare eighteenth-century women’s fiction with an eye towards these tensions between domestic, and plotted, space.
Francesca Blanch-Serrat, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain (@francesblase)
My research concerns the influence of (old) age and ageing on women writers’ self-perception and self-presentation in the long eighteenth century. During my visiting fellowship, I will assess the evolution of the self-presentation through time of three authors of different backgrounds. I will analyse Elizabeth Sarah Wilmot’s (1724-1793) three-volume manuscript poetry notebooks, Mary Masters’ (1694-1777) poetry collection Poems on Several Occasions and Agnes Porter’s (1752-1814) Journals and Letters (941.073 POR). Additionally, I will examine two items from Chawton House’s recipe book collection from the perspective of textual intergenerational mentoring, applying mentoring criticism and age studies to the paratext of the recipes, their aim and scope, and their collaborative nature
Autumn Cohort
Hannah Wilson, University of Cambridge
As a Visiting Fellow at Chawton House, I will complete research for my PhD dissertation concerning the complex relations between courtship gift exchange and coercion in eighteenth-century women’s writing. Using Chawton House’s collection of periodicals, conduct literature, and trial reports, I will investigate how experiences of sexual assault and consent were understood and articulated during this period, enabling an interrogation of normative sexual practice in eighteenth-century Britain and a reassessment of the mental manipulations shaping courting behaviour and relationships.
Louise Willis, King’s College London
The Chawton Fellowship will enable me to make significant progress on my PhD, which explores the Brontës’ depiction of “vital energies”, especially as I will be consulting the Tony Yablon Collection of rare Brontë scholarship. My doctoral research elucidates several modes of human energy that show how the Brontës disrupt the nineteenth-century socio-cultural expectation of bodily containment and regulation in the pursuit of agency. Chawton’s many conduct books and advice manuals will help me establish how a range of their female characters exhibit unregulated emotions that are deemed transgressive. Its corpus of botany books will help me identify how the domestic culture of botanical knowledge and practice, fostered women’s intellectual, emotional, and spiritual growth.
Emma Stanbridge, Keele University
My research at Chawton House will contribute to a chapter of my PhD dissertation, ‘Samuel Johnson, Life-Writing, and Lichfield Literary Culture, 1775-1835′, on letters and correspondence. I will use print editions of letters published during the long eighteenth century to explore how writers’ letters were compiled and edited to construct literary lives and identities. I will also use Chawton collections to examine the reproduction of correspondence in literary biography and explore the relationship between those forms of life writing at the end of the eighteenth century.
Winter Cohort
Alex Creighton, U.C. Berkeley USA
As a Visiting Fellow at Chawton House, I will pursue two professional goals: first, to study the Austen Family Music Books, which are crucial to my book chapter on Austen, Haydn, and Persuasion; second, to advance my research into the social history of domestic music-making. This second project will investigate how early music education primers framed the value of music and music-making for young people and especially for young women. I am broadly interested in how music and literature respond to gendered notions of habit and proper time use, and the resources at Chawton House will be instrumental in helping me further my research.
Kristina Decker, University College Cork, Ireland
Kristina Decker’s research focuses on the literary oeuvre of eighteenth-century collage artist Mary Delany, exploring how Delany engaged with the culture of Improvement through her writing, networks, and creative practices. The Chawton House Visiting fellowship will allow Kristina to begin expanding and revising her PhD thesis, ‘Women and Improvement in Eighteenth-Century Ireland: the Case of Mary Delany (1700-1788)’, for publication as a monograph. Utilising a range of manuscripts and printed works held within Chawton’s collections, including the 1780 manuscript of Mary Delany’s novella ‘Marianna’, she will focus on developing the first chapter of her monograph, ‘Writing the Enlightenment’, for publication.
Jingyue Wu, ShanghaiTech University, China
Dr Jingyue Wu is an Assistant Professor of English and Eighteenth-Century Studies at ShanghaiTech University, P. R. China. His research at Chawton House will contribute to his book project, Reassembling Britannia’s Secret: Women, Secret Writing, and the Reformation of Manners in the English Enlightenment, 1691-1757. Motivated by a crucial question in the studies of the first modern moral revolution—the English Enlightenment’s reformation of manners movement—namely “what the movement meant to women”, Jingyue’s project seeks to explore this question from the unique perspective of the period’s secret writing and culture. In doing so, he seeks not only to recover for the first modern moral revolution some of the most important voices of women that should not be forgotten, but also to reappraise the significance of some of the most intriguing innovations in the period’s secret literature.
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