The RECSO Network, currently supported by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) under the ‘New Network Scheme’, is a graduate-led initiative to facilitate interdisciplinary training, teaching and research in the long eighteenth century. As well as providing a physical space for researchers from different disciplines to encounter one another, in 2014-15 we will be holding a fortnightly series of talks, events, and seminars. Please visit http://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/recso.
The RECSO Team
Committee
The RECSO Blog and Network is administrated by a committee of graduate and ECR volunteers, who represent their respective faculties, author news posts, chair sessions, organise events, and carry out a variety of roles within the programme.
Geraldine Porter (History D.Phil Candidate, Director 2017-18)
Geraldine is a Clarendon-funded DPhil student in History at Merton College, Oxford. She is supervised by Professor Kathryn Gleadle. Her research focuses on elite political families in the British Houses of Parliament (c.1710-1780). She is interested in understanding the roles of kinship culture, dynasticism and interfamilial correspondence in the lives of prominent Georgian politicians who possessed a multitude of political colleagues who were related to them by blood or marriage. Outside of her doctoral dissertation, she is also interested in recovering the experiences of domesticated animals in the long-eighteenth century.
Paul Stephens (English D.Phil Candidate, Treasurer 2017-18)
Paul Stephens is a DPhil candidate in English Literature. His doctoral thesis examines the poetry and prose of Percy Bysshe Shelley through the disciplinary lens of economic philosophy, exploring how the poet’s understanding of concepts such as debt, money, and value are conditioned by his metaphysics and epistemology. His broader research interests focus upon the literature, philosophy, and economics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
His work is funded by an AHRC-Sloane Robinson Foundation Studentship at Lincoln College, and is supervised by Dr Timothy Michael. For details of Paul’s publications and conference papers, please visit his profile at Academia.edu or contact paul.stephens@lincoln.ox.ac.uk
Adam Bridgen (English D.Phil Candidate Ordinary Member, Founder and Former Director)
Adam founded RECSO in early 2014, and directed the project in its first year as a TORCH Network. He continues to support the project, and is currently working on RECSO’s long-term financial plan as a part of the university, and consulting with other graduate groups who wish to set up similar period-specific networks.
Adam is a DPhil student of English, and his research explores the significance of colonial slavery in eighteenth-century labouring-class poetry, specifically as a means of interrogating ideas of identity and social politics within Britain. Adam has previously worked on the the Digital Miscellanies Index , held a fellowship at the Huntington Library, and following his doctorate he hopes to further pursue his interest in labouring-class autobiography. Contact: adam.bridgen@ell.ox.ac.uk
Dr Fiona Gatty (History of Art, Seminar Coordinator)
Dr Fiona Gatty is an art historian and recently completed her doctoral studies on the topic of ideal beauty in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French art and art criticism, with a particular emphasis on the historical and teleological importance of accurate costume, and the aesthetic impact of drapery in the definition of ideal beauty. She is particularly interested in the attention given to clothing by the father of art history and archaeology, Johann Joachim Winckelmann and the impact of his work on late eighteenth-century French art theory and practice. She was a contributor to ‘The Beautiful and the Monstrous: Essays in French Literature’ by Amaleena Damle, Aurelie L’Hostis (Eds) (2007). She also publishes exhibition reviews, regularly gives conference papers, and teaches aesthetics, and eighteenth -and nineteenth-century French art history. Contact: fiona.gatty@materials.ox.ac.uk
Peter Hill (Oriental Studies, Junior Research Fellow, Awards Officer)
Peter is in the process of completing his DPhil in Oriental Studies, working on Arabic literature and intellectual history of the nineteenth century. He is writing a thesis on utopian aspects of the cultural production of the Arab ‘Renaissance’ (Nahda), and their grounding in the social history of the Ottoman-Arab world of the long nineteenth century. This was a period of major contact with European culture, and his research has been centrally concerned with translations of French and English literature into Arabic – for instance Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Fénelon’s Les aventures de Télémaque. His article on the first Arabic translations of Enlightenment literature recently appeared in Intellectual History Review, and another on early translations of English fiction into Arabic in the Journal of Semitic Studies. He also writes for the Oxford Left Review, the Oxonian Review and Muftah magazine. Contact: peter.hill@chch.ox.ac.uk
Emily Knight (History of Art D.Phil Candidate, Ordinary Member – former Director and Seminar Co-Ordinator)
Emily is a D.Phil student in History of Art supervised by Prof. Hanneke Grootenboer. Her research focuses on posthumous portraiture in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries in Britain, considering the ways in which these works became a language for mourning and commemoration. Further information can be found on her Academia.edu profile page. Contact: emily.knight@trinity.ox.ac.uk | Twitter: @eamknight
Dr Fabio Morabito (Lord Crewe Junior Research Fellow, Lincoln College)
Fabio Morabito is the Lord Crewe Junior Research Fellow in Music at Lincoln College. His research focuses primarily on musical culture in Paris and Vienna in the early nineteenth century, looking at the cult of eccentricity and the origins of celebrity, the commercialization of selfhood, and the intellectual history of musical authorship. He is interested in how both music performers and composers conceptualised their roles and constructed their artistic identity in the eyes of the public. Other interests include canon formation and music historiography, the ontology of musical notation and performance studies.
Alice Little (Music D.Phil Candidate, Ordinary Member and Seminar Co-Ordinator)
Alice’s doctoral 
research focuses on the tunebooks of J. B. Malchair, who collected ‘national music’ on the streets of Oxford, 1760-1812. Her work explores eighteenth-century collecting practices and provincial musical life. She is interested in the historical use and categorisation of what is now tered ‘vernacular’ or ‘traditional’ music, and in the relative values placed on print, manuscript, and oral sources in the eighteenth century.
Naturally interdisciplinary, Alice has an undergraduate degree in Modern History and an MSc in Material Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, both from the University of Oxford. She holds the Hélène La Rue Scholarship in Music at St Cross College. Contact: alice.little@music.ox.ac.uk | Twitter: @littleamiss | Website: alicelittle.co.uk
Jacob Lloyd (English D.Phil Candidate, Social Secretary)
Jacob is a DPhil student in the English Faculty supervised by Professor Seamus Perry. His area of research is Romantic poetry within the long 18th Century, especially between 1790 and 1830. His thesis examines the verse of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley and how they developed their political aesthetics. His primary focus is on how these poets negotiated the contradiction between the necessity of experiencing the world subjectively, through their poetry, and a political desire to create a community which relied on an objective framework. Contact: jacob.lloyd@balliol.ox.ac.uk
Anna Senkiw (English DPhil, Ordinary Member, Former Director 2016-17)
Anna is a D.Phil student researching ‘British Actresses and Fan Culture: Cultivating Celebrity on the Stage, Page and in the Frame in the Late Eighteenth Century’. Her project explores how celebrity culture developed in relation to the increasingly visual and literate society, the advancements in the technology and reach of print culture and the growing secular structure of society. She is the recipient of the John Hodgson Theatre Research Fellowship from Mansfield College, Oxford.
Anna’s interests include; eighteenth-century women writers, gender theory, life-writing (especially letters and autobiography), British theatre history, print culture and, of course, actresses. In addition to her work with RECSO, she is also the English Faculty’s Graduate Teaching and Careers Officer 2016-17. Contact: anna.senkiw@mansfield.ox.ac.uk | Twitter: @AnnaSenkiw
RECSO Associates
Joe Davies (Music)
Joe is in the second year of a doctoral project (funded by the AHRC) that aims to develop an analytical and critical framework for understanding notions of fantasy, grotesquerie, and the uncanny in Schubert’s late music.
His other research and teaching interests include the keyboard music of C.P.E. Bach, Mozart, and Haydn, German Romanticism, and reception history. Contact: joe.davies@music.ox.ac.uk
Joanna Raisbeck (Modern Languages D.Phil Candidate)
Joanna is a D.Phil student in Modern Languages supervised by Dr Kevin Hilliard. Her research focuses on religion and philosophy in the work of the German Romantic writer Karoline von Günderrode. Her research considers how Günderrode adapted Enlightenment thought, Early German Romantic thought, Classical philosophy, and German Idealism to explore the relationship between the individual and the totality (a heterodox proxy for God, understood as quasi-Spinozan panentheism). She holds a Heath Harrison-Somerville College scholarship and for the academic year 2015-16 held a Hanseatic scholarship, awarded by the Alfred Töpfer Stiftung, and undertook archival research at the Goethe-Universität and Freies Deutsches Hochstift in Frankfurt am Main. For more information, see her Academia.edu profile (https://oxford.academia.edu/JoannaRaisbeck). Contact: joanna.raisbeck@some.ox.ac.uk
Dr. Kelsey Rubin-Detlev (Medieval & Modern Languages, Enlightenment Associate)
Kelsey is the Foote Junior Research Fellow in Russian at The Queen’s College. Her research focuses on the correspondence of Catherine the Great and on women’s letter writing in eighteenth-century Europe more broadly. Contact: kelsey.rubin-detlev@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk
Dr Ruth Scobie (Lecturer in English, Mansfield College, Oxford)
Dr Ruth Scobie was the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Exploring Celebrity and is now an Early Career Research Fellow at TORCH. She is working on a monograph, Islands of Celebrity: Oceania and the British Problem of Fame, 1770-1823, which links perceptions of the South Pacific in the late eighteenth century and Romantic period to transformations in the ideas and technologies of fame. She also runs the Celebrity Research Network at the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), organising a programme of interdisciplinary and cross-period events on fame, celebrity, reputation and notoriety in history, literature, and art.
Ruth studied for an MA in Eighteenth Century Studies (The Global Eighteenth Century), and a PhD in English Literature at the University of York, with the thesis title “The Many Deaths of Captain Cook: A Study in Metropolitan Mass Culture.” In 2012 she won the Keats-Shelley Prize for an essay on Mary Shelley and James Cook, published in 2013 in the Keats-Shelley Review. She has taught undergraduate courses at York and Oxford on eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, eighteenth-century empire and commerce, and literary theory, and recently devised and taught an English MSt course on “British Globalisations, Georgian to Romantic”. She has also published research-based posts and reviews for academic readers at Object Archives, Romantic Textualities, and BSECS Criticks, and for a general audience at the-toast.net and the Ashmolean Museum. Contact: ruth.scobie@mansfield.ox.ac.uk | Twitter: @18CenturyScobie
Jennifer Wood (English DPhil Candidate)
Jennifer is an AHRC-funded D.Phil. student in English at University College, Oxford, supervised by Prof. Nicholas Halmi and Prof. Pamela Clemit. Her thesis examines William Godwin’s hitherto unacknowledged status as a major node in an intricate system of epistolary networks that spanned over five decades of the Romantic period (c.1778-1836). Specifically, it considers how – and in what ways – the private letter enabled Godwin to forge, sustain, develop, and often terminate relationships (both personal and professional) in a discursive, intellectually rigorous, pre-digital era. For Jennifer’s detailed research profile, click here. Contact: jennifer.wood@univ.ox.ac.uk
Advisory Panel
The RECSO project is advised by a panel of senior academics:
- Prof. Abigail Williams. Contact: abigail.williams@ell.ox.ac.uk
- Dr Freya Johnston. Contact: freya.johnston@ell.ox.ac.uk
Contact
To participate in this Network, or to join the Network mailing list, please contact Geraldine (geraldine.porter@merton.ox.ac.uk). We are constantly looking for interesting speakers for both our own, and related, programmes – so if you have a talk which corresponds to the themes outlined above, please get in touch.
RECSO 