Seminar Programmes for the Current Academic Year
Hilary 2025
Convenor(s): Lorna Hutson, Joe Moshenska, Bart Van Es
Time: Tuesdays. Weeks 1, 3, 5, and 7, 17:15-19:00; Week 5: 12.30-14.00
Venues: see each event
Week 1: Jan 21, 17:00. Merton College, T.S. Eliot Lecture Theatre.
‘Cattle of this Colour: Boy Actors and the Engendering of Race’
Speaker: Dr. Harry McCarthy (Exeter University)
Week 3: Feb 4, 17:15. Merton College, T.S. Eliot Lecture Theatre.
‘Maplessness, encyclopaedism and the emotion of absolute uncertainty in early modern scientific poetry’
Speaker: Prof. Kevin Killeen (York)
Abstract: ‘Much of the energy of early modern scientific thought comes from its obsessions with the prolific, the encyclopaedic variety of created things, verdant here, metallic there. But philosophy that could spur exuberance in this plenitude could also sicken. In a long quasi-scientific poem, The Submarine Voyage (1691), Thomas Heyrick, who happens to be a depressed dolphin, finds himself beset by an overwhelming melancholy as he encounters an underside of physico-theology, where the kaleidoscopic excess of the natural world overwhelms him. Driven by an epistemological frenzy and imperial bluster, he discovers in the trackless undersea waters no answers, and no rest: a cornucopia of unextractable mineral riches, unfathomable aquatic life and geological mystery, together with heaps of pointless art and sunken ships. The paper will explore the era’s fever of natural philosophy and how, in this as well as other scientific poems, writers attempted to craft a poetics not only to fit but to critique contemporary science.’
Week 5: Feb 18, 12:30-14:00. Merton College, Mure Room. Sandwich lunch provided.
Reading Group: Samuel Daniel’s Musophilus with Prof. Ted Tregear
Week 7: Mar 4, 17:15-19:00. Merton College, T.S. Eliot Lecture Theatre.
‘Dumb Action’
Speaker: Prof. Gillian Woods (Magdalen)
Convenor(s): Ros Ballaster, Nicole Pohl, Tess Somervell, David Taylor, Carly Watson, Abigail Williams, Christine Gerrard.
Time: Tuesdays. Weeks 4, 6, 7, 8. Check individual events for times.
Venue: Seminar Room East, Mansfield College (except Week 7, in Balliol)
Week 4: Tuesday 11 Feb, 17.30-19.00
‘Susanna Centlivre's The Busy Body (1709) revived for the 21st century stage’
Speaker: David Taylor (University of Oxford) and Director Gabriella Bird
Week 6: Tuesday Feb 25, 17.30-19.00.
‘Tangible Pasts: Antiquarian Culture and the Novel in the Eighteenth Century’
Speaker: Katharina Boehm (University of Passau)
Week 7: Tuesday 4 Mar, 17:30-19:00. N.B: Seminar is Joint with the Romanticism Seminar, and will be held in Balliol College, Massey Room.
‘Hester Thrale Piozzi’s Minced Meat for Pyes: Scrapbook Composition as Life Writing’
Speaker: Julie Park (Penn State University)
Week 8: Tuesday 11 Mar, 12:30-13:45. Sandwich lunch provided.
‘“The capital pen of a sister author”: Reading Frances Burney with Jane Austen’
Speaker: Peter Sabor (McGill University, Canada)
Convenor(s): Nicholas Cronk (St. Edmund Hall) and Avi Lifschitz (Magdalen College)
Time: Wednesday, Weeks 2, 4, 6, 7, 8. 17.00 (except Week 7).
Venue: Magdalen College. See individual seminars for rooms.
Week 2: Wednesday 29 Jan. 17.00. Summer Common Room
‘Robespierre Speaks’
Speaker: Colin Jones (QMUL)
Week 4: Wednesday 12 Feb. 17.00. Sophia Sheppard Room.
Roundtable on The Enlightenment: An Idea and Its History (2024) by J.C.D Clark.
Discussants: Jacob Chatterjee, Caroline Warman, John Robertson.
Response: J.C.D Clark
Week 6: Wednesday 26 Feb. 17.00. Summer Common Room.
‘Newton's Reception at the Berlin Academy’
Speaker: Tinca Pruneau-Bretonnet (Bucharest)
Week 7: Wednesday 5 Mar. 11.00. Online.
‘Montesquieu in East Asia’
Speaker: Jeanhyoung Soh (Seoul National University)
Annual online session with the Global Intellectual History Unit, Sungkyungkwan University.
Week 8: Wednesday 12 Mar. 17.00. Sophia Sheppard Room.
‘Kant's Republicanism’
Speaker: Pauline Kleingeld (Groningen)
Convenor(s): P. Gauci (Lincoln), H. Smith (St. Hilda's), B. Harris (Worcester)
Time: Tuesdays. Weeks 1-8. 16.15 (with tea and coffee available from 16.00)
Venue: Beckington Room, Lincoln College. For those away from Oxford, the talks will be available on Teams (except for Week 7). Apply to perry.gauci@lincoln.ox.ac.uk for the link to join the meeting online.
Week 1: Tuesday 21 Jan. 16.15.
'The Prince's Passion: George IV, Mary Hamilton, and the Burning of Letters in the Eighteenth Century'
Speaker: Zoe Screti (Voltaire Foundation)
Week 2: Tuesday 28 Jan. 16.15.
‘The Endurance of Entail: Feudal Law, Political Economy, and Land Reform in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain’
Speaker: Tom Pye (UCL)
Week 3: Tuesday 4 Feb. 16.15.
‘Antislavery before Abolition: Decoding Resistance in British Labouring-Class Verse, 1660-1800’
Speaker: Adam Brigden (Durham)
Week 4: Tuesday 11 Feb. 16.15.
‘No Common Man: Searching for Shadrack Byfield, a Disabled Veteran of the War of 1812’
Speaker: Eamonn O'Keeffe (Cambridge)
Week 5: Tuesday 18 Feb. 16.15.
‘The Informal Beginnings of the Partisan Expert Witness in English Common Law: Patent Specification, Natural Philosophy, and Courtroom Theatrics, 1763-1785’
Speaker: Alex Aizenmann (Pembroke)
Week 6: Tuesday 25 Feb. 16.15.
‘In Me You See the Almighty's Wondrous Power: Black Women's Intellectual History in Georgian Britain’
Speaker: Meleisa Ono-George (Queen's)
Week 7: Tuesday 4 Mar. 16.15.
Undergraduate thesis session. In-person only.
A recent undergraduate will discuss the experience and findings of their BA thesis.
Week 8: Tuesday 11 Mar. 16.15.
‘Hawksmooring and Townsending is All Out for this Century: Building for Oxford from the Sheldonian to the Schwarzman Centre’
Speaker: William Whyte (St. John's)
For information about the seminar, and news of forthcoming events, visit our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Oxford-seminar-in-mainly-British-History-...
We would be happy to post notices of interest to our group – contact perry.gauci@lincoln.ox.ac.uk
* Termcard to be posted soon *
Convenors: Edmund Wareham Wanitzek (Royal Holloway), Niko Munz (Christ Church), Lyndal Roper (Oriel), Róisín Watson (Open University), Johannes Dillinger (Oxford Brookes)
Time: Mondays, Week 1, 3, 5, 7. 13.30.
Venue: Online (Weeks 1, 3, 5, 7) and History Faculty (Weeks 5 & 7). Please contact edmund.wareham@rhul.ac.uk for joining details.
Week 1: Monday 20 Jan. 13.30. Online
‘Bartmann Goes Global! How German Stoneware Traveled Round the Known World in the 16th/17th Century'
Speaker: Jacqui Pearce (Museum of London Archaeology)
Week 3: Monday 3 Feb. 13.30. Online
‘The Mind Besieged: Spectacle and Stoicism in Sixteenth-Century Cologne’
Speaker: William Theiss (Connecticut)
Week 5: Monday 17 Feb. 13.30. Merze Tate Room, Faculty of History, and Online.
‘Printing Up: The Career of the Frankfurt Printer-Publisher Nicolaus Bassaeus and the Sixteenth-Century Book World’
Speaker: Oliver Kruk (Bamberg/Oxford)
Week 7: Monday 3 Mar. 13.30. Rees Davies Room, Faculty of History, and Online.
‘Jan Boeckhorst and the Artistic Practice of Paper Recycling "avant la lettre"’
Speaker: An van Kamp (Ashmolean/Oxford)
Convenor(s): Ian Archer, Alexandra Gajda, Steven Gunn, Lucy Wooding
Time: Thursdays 5pm, Weeks 1-8 (Except Week 2, at 5pm)
Venue: Lincoln Collegge, Oakeshott Room. Via Teams: please email ian.archer@history.ox.ac.uk for link.
Week 1: Thursday Jan 23, 17.00.
‘Recordkeepers and the Early Modern Information State: The John Poyntz Case’
Speaker: Dr Alex Beeton (History of Parliament)
Recommended Reading: A. Beeton, ‘Recording a Revolution: the clerk of the parliaments and the journals of the House of Lords, 1640–9', Historical Research (advanced access); G. Sternberg, ‘Manipulating Information in the Ancien Régime: Ceremonial Records, Aristocratic Strategies, and the Limits of the State Perspective’, Journal of Modern History, 85 (2013), 239-79; F. de Vivo, ‘Heart of the State, Site of Tension: The Archival Turn Viewed from Venice, ca. 1400-1700’, Annales, 68 (2013), 459-85.
Week 2: Thursday Jan 30, 17.30
ONLINE ONLY, START TIME 5.30 ‘Enfranchisement and the Rights of Freeborn Englishmen, c.1500-1800'
Speaker: Prof. Steve Hindle (Washington University St Louis)
Recommended Reading: Robert Allen, ‘The Yeoman Alternative’, Enclosure and the Yeoman: The Agricultural Development of the South Midlands, 1450-1850 (Oxford, 1992), ch.15, 303-11; Steve Hindle, ‘The View from the Yardlands: Common Property Rights and the Parliamentary Enclosure of Warmington, Warwickshire, c.1750-1820’, Agricultural History Review, 72:2 (2024), 139-68.
Week 3: Thursday Feb 6, 17.00.
Paper 1:
“Looke from Adam”: Genesis, History, and Religious Community in early modern England, 1590-1660’
Speaker: Samuel Head (Wolfson College) ‘
Recommended Reading: John Robertson, 'Sacred History and Political Thought: Neapolitan Responses to the Problem of Sociability After Hobbes', Historical Journal 56/1 (2013): 1-29; Kevin Sharpe, ‘Reading revelations: Prophecy, hermeneutics and politics in early modern Britain, 1560-1720’, in Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker (eds.), Reading, Society, and Politics in early modern England (Cambridge, 2003), 122-64.
Paper 2:
‘“Honor and deceit”: The Warres of Cyrus, Classical Persia, and Elizabethan Politics’
Speaker: Ebrahim Hanifehpour (Lincoln College)
Recommended Reading: Henry James and Greg Walker, ‘The Politics of Gorboduc, English Historical Review 110/435 (1995), 109-21; Peter Lake, Bad Queen Bess?: Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Elizabeth I (Oxford, 2016), 19-94.
Week 4: Thursday Feb 13, 17.00.
Paper 1:
‘Regulatory Failure and the Moral Antecedents of Public Banking in England, 1559-1642’
Speaker: Raphael Adès (Christ Church)
Recommended Reading: Norman Jones, God and the Moneylenders: Usury and the Law in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1989); Thomas Wilson and R. H. Tawney, A Discourse upon Usury, by Way of Dialogue and Orations: For the Better Variety and More Delight of All Those That Shall Read This Treatise [1572] (London, 1925).
Paper 2:
‘Seventeenth-Century Foxe? Samuel Clarke and Presbyterian Historiography’
Speaker: Matthew Leech-Gerrard (New College)
Recommended Reading: Peter Lake, ‘Reading Clarke’s Lives in Political and Polemical Context’, in K.M. Sharpe and S.N. Zwicker (eds), Writing Lives: Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representation in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2008), 293-318; Peter Lake, ‘The Godly Lives of Samuel Clarke and the “National Church” in the 1650s’, Seventeenth Century, 38/6 (2023), 929-47.
Week 5: Thursday Feb 20, 17.00.
‘Katherine Parr’s Lamentation of a Sinner (1547), Cranmer’s Homilies, and the Production of the Book of Common Prayer’
Speaker: Professor Micheline White (Carleton University)
Recommended Reading: Lamentation of a Sinner (1547) in Janel M. Mueller (ed.), Katherine Parr: Complete Works and Correspondence (Chicago, 2011), intro, 425-42; Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (New Haven and London, 1998), 372-9.
Week 6: Thursday Feb 27, 17.00.
‘English Politics and the Colonial Revolutions of 1689’
Speaker: Dr Gabriel Glickman (Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge)
Recommended Reading: Owen Stanwood, ‘Rumours and Rebellions in the English Atlantic World, 1688-9’, in Tim Harris and Stephen Taylor (eds.), The Final Crisis of the Stuart Monarchy. The Revolutions of 1688-91 in their British, Atlantic and European Contexts (2013); Mark Peterson, The City State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630–1865 (2019), ch 3.
Week 7: Thursday Mar 6, 17.00.
‘Library Access in Early-Modern Europe: English and Scottish Scholars Abroad and the Limits of Knowledge Exchange’
Speaker: Dr John-Mark Philo (University of East Anglia and Bodleian Library)
Recommended Reading: Jonathan Woolfson, Padua and the Tudors: English Students in Italy, 1485–1603 (Cambridge, 1998); Jessica G. Purdy, ‘Access, restrictions and readership in early modern parish libraries’, 2024, accessible online via St Andrews Research Repository; Robert B. Todd, ‘Henry and Thomas Savile in Italy’, Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 58/2 (1996), 439-44.
Week 8: Thursday Mar 13 17.00.
First Year Graduate Presentations
Convenors: Sir Noel Malcolm and Dr. Nuno Castel-Branco
Time: Thursdays, Weeks 1-8. 14.00
Venue: All Souls College, Hovenden Room.
Week 1: Thursday 23 Jan. 14.00.
‘Cataloguing the Enlightenment: Legacies of Classification and Marginalisation’
Speaker: Dr. Zoe Screti
Week 2: Thursday 30 Jan. 14.00
‘The Deuteronomic Motive for Religious Intolerance in Pre-Modern Christian Europe’
Speaker: Dr. Jonathan Nathan
Week 3: Thursday 6 Feb. 14.00
‘Pietro Carnesecchi (1508-67): Papal Pronotary, Reformer, Intelligencer, Martyr’
Speaker: Prof. Susan Brigden
Week 4: Thursday 13 Feb. 14.00
‘Spiritual Discipline in Post-Reformation Humanism: Learning, Religion, and Politics in the Life of Johannes Caselius (1533-1613)’
Speaker: Dr. Tomás Valle (Hamburg)
Week 5: Thursday 20 Feb. 14.00
‘A Double Observance: Michael Boym SJ (c. 1612-59) on his Journeys to China’
Speaker: Prof. Gianna Pomata (Johns Hopkins)
Week 6: Thursday 27 Feb. 14.00
‘England's Freedom: Rethinking the 1650s’
Speaker: Prof. Michael Braddick
Week 7: Thursday 6 Mar. 14.00
‘Leibniz in Holland, November 1676: Zooming in, Zooming out’
Speaker: Prof. Eric Jorink (Leiden)
Week 8: Thursday 13 Mar. 14.00
‘Promoting the Coercion of Heretics in Early Modern Reformed Protestantism’
Speaker: Dr. Odile Panetta
Convenor: Hanna Sinclair
Time: Mondays, Week 1, 3, 5, 7. 16.30.
Venue: Jesus College, Ship St. Centre.
Week 1: Monday 20 Jan. 16.30.
‘Shipwreck and Survival: Louis XVI, Ferdinand VII, and Revolution’
Speaker: Munro Price (University of Bradford, Emeritus)
Week 3: Monday 3 Feb. 16.30
‘Four Weddings and a Funeral: The Savoy Marriage of July 1559’
Speaker: Richard Cooper (Brasenose)
Week 5: Monday 17 Feb. 16.30.
‘Aristocrats Without Borders: The Emergence of a Cosmopolitan Elite in the 17th-Century Habsburg Monarchy’
Speaker: Bianca Lindorfer (University of Vienna)
Week 7: Monday 3 Mar. 16.30
‘"Kingless Progresses": Locating Authority in the Regencies of Henry VIII's Queens’
Speaker: Kirsty Wright (Historic Royal Palaces)
Convenors: Jessica Goodman, Marina Perkins, Rachel Hindmarsh
Time: Thursdays, Weeks, 1, 3, 5, 7. 12:30-14:00 (except week 3)
Venue: Maison Française d’Oxford (except week 3)
Week 1: Jan 23, 12:30-14:00. Maison Française d'Oxford, salon.
‘Time and Novelty in the Novellas of Giovanni Boccaccio and Marguerite de Navarre’
Speaker: Raphaelle Burns (UCLA)
Week 3: Feb 6, 12:15-13:45. St John's College.
‘Thunderstruck: Corneille’s Poetics of the Lightning-Bolt’
Speaker: Joseph Harris, RHUL.
Week 5: Feb 20, 12.30-14.00. Maison Française d'Oxford, salon.
‘Life on Loan: Precarity and Revocation in Two Early Modern Esthers (Montchrestien, Racine)’
Speaker: Luke O'Sullivan (St Hilda's)
Week 7: Mar 6, 12:30-14:00. Maison Française d'Oxford, salon.
‘What is a Lesser Magistrate? Protestant Resistance Theory from Early Modern France to Trump’s America’
Speaker: Anna Rosensweig (Rochester)
Convenors: Filippo de Vivo, Leah Clark, Zoe Farrell, Federica Gigante, Giuseppe Marcocci, Jane Stevens Crawshaw, Emanuela Vai, Anya Perse.
Time: Tuesdays, Week 1, 3, 5, 7. 14:00-16:00.
Venue: St. Edmund Hall, Old Dining Hall.
Week 1: Jan 21, 14:00
‘Verona: Artisans and material culture in a provincial Renaissance city’
Speaker: Zoe Farrell (Oxford)
Week 3: Feb 4, 14:00.
‘Local and global: Intersecting dimensions in Renaissance Southern Italy’
Speaker: Bianca de Divitiis (Naples)
Week 5: Feb 18, 14:00.
‘Digital History and 18th-century journeys to Italy’
Speaker: Giovanna Ceserani (Stanford)
Week 7: Mar 4, 14:00.
Joint Session on The Italian Peninsula and the European Wars of Religion
Speakers: Lana Martysheva (Ecole française de Rome) and Nina Lamal (Huygens Instituut, Amsterdam)
Convenor: Tracey Sowerby
Time: Tuesdays, Weeks 4, 6, 8. 16.15
Venue: Merze Tate Room, History Faculty and online. Please contact Dr Tracey Sowerby (tracey.sowerby@history.ox.ac.uk) for the meeting details if you are not on the seminar mailing list.
Week 4: Feb 11, 16.15
Reading week: rethinking early modern treaties. Discussion of the following items:
Saliha Belmoussos, ‘What is a colonial treaty? Questioning the visible and the invisible in European and non-European legal negotiations’,Comparative Legal History, 10/2 (2022), 137-71
Week 6: Feb 25, 16.15.
Roundtable discussion on pre-modern Chinese diplomacy. Featuring Prof. Henrietta Harrison (Oxford), Dr Song-Chuan Chen (Warwick), and Thomas Barrett (Cambridge)
Week 8: Mar 11, 16.15
‘The Tsushima Domain and the Taiping Rebellion: Intelligence Networks and Information Circulation in Japan, 1853–1855’
Speaker: Dr Yongchao Chen (Tohoku University),
