by Alice Rhodes, University of York In Spring 2022, thanks to the generous funding of the BECC and BSECS Early Career Fellowship, I spent a week in the Cadbury Research Library researching the Joseph Priestley Collection for my current project on bodies and voices in Romantic literature. The Cadbury library holds a number of manuscript … Continue reading “Joseph Priestley’s Material Voices”
Author: Tom Cutterham
Histories of Care in the Cadbury Library Special Collections
by Kate Gibson, University of Manchester Support from BECC and BSECS allowed me to visit the Cadbury Library to examine a small collection of 31 letters, written by gentry woman Ann Ambler. Revealing her care of siblings Isabella and Thomasin Ibbetson, the letters provide new insight into fostering in the eighteenth century. The girls were … Continue reading “Histories of Care in the Cadbury Library Special Collections”
Autumn Programme
11 October, 5-7pm, Cadbury Research Library: Launch of Rebecca Whitely, Birth Figures: Early Modern Prints and the Pregnant Body. A brief introduction to the book and conversation between Rebecca and Dr Elizabeth L’Estrange will be followed by a chance to examine some early modern midwifery books held in the collections of the Cadbury Research Library. At 6pm … Continue reading “Autumn Programme”
Spring Programme of Events
Wednesday 15 March, 2-3.30pm How Global Was the Age of Revolutions? Co-sponsored with the Birmingham Research Institute for History and Cultures (BRIHC), this online roundtable features world-leading scholars, including Sujit Sivasundaram (Cambridge) and Joanna Innes (Oxford), in discussion on the late eighteenth century’s global turn. Please follow the link to register online for this event. *** … Continue reading “Spring Programme of Events”
Unhomely Empire: A Forum, Part 3
By Onni Gust (University of Nottingham) I am writing this response in the uncomfortable and over-lit departure gate of Chicago O’Hare’s international airport, heading back to the UK from the NACBS conference, and from a state, Illinois, that I once fleetingly and ambivalently called ‘home’. This seems like an apt place to be reflecting on … Continue reading “Unhomely Empire: A Forum, Part 3”
Unhomely Empire: A Forum, Part 2
By Liz Egan (University of Warwick) With just four letters, “home” carries a diverse set of connotations ranging from comfort and belonging, to resistance and violence. In framing their book around the ‘unhomely’ nature of empire for the eighteenth-century British elite, Gust carefully interrogates the centrality of home and belonging to ideas about human difference … Continue reading “Unhomely Empire: A Forum, Part 2”
Unhomely Empire: A Forum, Part 1
By Ellen Smith (University of Leicester) In Unhomely Empire, Dr Onni Gust considers eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century conceptions of ‘home’ beyond the physical and material space of the house. Gust offers a complex understanding of the ideological and discursive work that home has performed as an emotional concept throughout history. They take the reader through the … Continue reading “Unhomely Empire: A Forum, Part 1”
Unhomely Empire: A Forum, Introduction
A year ago, BECC held a reading group and online discussion for our midlands colleague Onni Gust’s new book, Unhomely Empire: Whiteness and Belonging, c.1760-1830. Across two sessions of discussion, we explored the book’s analysis of how empire and whiteness made each other, its uses of intellectual and literary evidence across genres, and its relation … Continue reading “Unhomely Empire: A Forum, Introduction”
Magical Source: A Quaker Forgery?
This post was contributed by Naomi Pullen, at the University of Warwick. It is part of our Magical Source series, in which historians from Birmingham and Warwick discuss the sources that reshaped their thinking on a topic. The first entry, by Karen Harvey, was about Mary Toft’s Confessions. The second, by Charles Walton, was about … Continue reading “Magical Source: A Quaker Forgery?”
Magical Source: Lord Grantham’s Coach
This post was contributed by Ben Jackson, here at the University Birmingham. It is part of our Magical Source series, in which historians from Birmingham and Warwick discuss the sources that reshaped their thinking on a topic. The first entry, by Karen Harvey, was about Mary Toft’s Confessions. The second, by Charles Walton, was about … Continue reading “Magical Source: Lord Grantham’s Coach”