Seminar Programmes for the Current Academic Year

Convenors: Lorna Hutson, Joe Moshenska, Bart Van Es

Dates: Tuesdays, Weeks 1, 3, 5 & 7

Time: 5.15-7.00 p.m. (except Week 7)

Venue: TS Eliot Lecture Theatre, Merton College

Week 1, 28 April

 Professor Gordon Teskey (Harvard University)

‘Dark Energy: John Donne's Saint Lucy Nocturnal’

Abstract:

The most challenging of Donne’s lyric poems, “A Nocturnal Upon Saint Lucy’s Day”, is set at a boundary moment between worlds: at midnight, winter solstice, 1617, four months after the death of the poet’s wife. Donne strove to come to terms with this loss twice before: in Holy Sonnet 17, where his wife is inaccessibly in Heaven; and in the Latin inscription for her grave marker, where his ashes join hers in a “new marriage.” In the Saint Lucy Nocturnal, the poet raises the Parmenidean question of being and not-being by continually and ingeniously affirming his nonentity: “I am by her death … Of the first nothing, the elixir grown.” Are such statements merely nonsense, though powerful expressions of feeling? Do they have a further purpose? The key is in the poet’s reference to them as preparation. I contend we may see them as a meditative practice akin to the Buddhist notions of nothingness and no-self, a thinning-toward-nothing. The poet prepares to enter a third space between life and death, one where his wife already “enjoys her long night’s festival.”

Week 3, 12 May

Oxford CEMS: Global Early Modern Conversations I

Nandini Das in conversation with Wes Williams (French) and Bart Van Es (English) on This Little World: A New History of Tudor and Stuart England (Bloomsbury, 2026)

Week 5, 26 May

Douglas Clark (Wadham) ‘The Miscellaneous Poetry of Elizabeth Bidgood: A New Archival Discovery' 

Abstract:

My paper offers the first examination of Elizabeth Bidgood’s unique acrostic poetry, as found in the Newberry Library’s manuscript miscellany, Y 1845.7. This rather badly damaged miscellany contains a wealth of original elegiac and panegyric poetry written by Bidgood which, in part, celebrates the lives of a broad network of women associated with the Bidgood family (c. 1670-1720). I’ll consider how Bidgood’s work can advance our understanding of non-professional poetic practice, while also offering some practical advice on how to conduct research on early modern manuscript materials.

Beatrice Groves (Trinity) ‘ “Sternhold & Hopkins” and Shakespeare’

Abstract:

One reason for the psalms’ importance for Shakespeare – a text alluded to over four hundred times across his work - lies in their status as poetry, a sacred eloquence that “made this book one of the primary models for lyric poetry in the Western tradition.” This talk, however, will argue (perhaps surprisingly) for the influence on Shakespeare of a translation – “Sternhold & Hopkins'” (The Whole Booke of the Psalmes, 1562) – which has been widely castigated as poetry. These metrical psalms were the outstanding best-seller of Shakespeare’s lifetime and his allusions to them are both evidence for the fluidity and flexibility of his source use and of his engagement with a profoundly popular text. The Whole Booke would have been heard and sung by the vast majority of Englishmen and women during Shakespeare’s lifetime and its presence in Shakespeare’s work forms an oft-overlooked aspect of his interaction with the popular culture of his time.

Week 7, 9 June, 5.30pm (please note change of time)

Oxford CEMS: Global Early Modern Conversations II

Kirsten Macfarlane (University of Chicago) in conversation with Adam Smyth (Book History) and Lloyd Pratt (American literature) on Lay Learning and the Bible in the Seventeenth Century Atlantic World (Oxford: 2025)

Refreshments served

All welcome

Convenors: Ian Archer, Alexandra Gajda, Steven Gunn and Lucy Wooding

Dates: Thursdays, every week

Time: 5.00 pm

Venue: Oakeshott Room, Lincoln College; online via Teams (please email ian.archer@history.ox.ac.uk)

*Term card to be uploaded soon*

Convenors: Natalia Nowakowska, Giora Sternberg, Giuseppe Marcocci, Filippo de Vivo, Howard Hotson

This seminar does not usually run in Trinity Term, but this term there will be one talk, which has been rescheduled from Michaelmas. Please note the venue is different from usual.

Week 2: Tuesday 5 May 2026, 2pm

St Edmund Hall, Old Dining Hall

Peter Burke (Cambridge): ‘Toward a History of Misunderstandings: The Missionaries’ Dilemma’

Chair: Filippo de Vivo

Convenors: Dr Tracey Sowerby and Antonio Pattori

Dates: Tuesdays, Weeks 2, 4, 6 & 8

Time: 4.15 p.m.

Location: T.B.C.

*Term card to be uploaded soon*

Convenors: Marina Perkins, Rachel Hindmarsh, Wes Williams, and Georgina Walker

Dates: Thursdays, Weeks 1, 3 & 7

Time: 12.30 – 2.00 p.m. (except Week 3)

Venue: Mark Bedingham Seminar Room, St John’s College (Weeks 1 & 3); Salon, Maison Française d’Oxford (Week 7) 

Week 1: 30 April, 12.30-2.00 p.m.

Mark Bedingham Seminar Room, St John’s College

Emma Gilby (Cambridge University): ‘The Making of Modern Languages: Disciplinary History in the Archives’

Abstract:

My current research investigates the early history of modern languages as a university discipline. Prompted by my own encounter with the interwar editorial work of two early modernists (H. Bibas and K.T. Butler), I envisage this as a network study, expanding outwards from these two women via their predecessors, role models, colleagues, sisters, correspondents etc. The aim is to offer glimpses of connections and affinities that suggest and enrich a much bigger picture. Who were the first modern linguists, and what kinds of modern lives did they want to lead? What did they borrow from the study of ancient languages, and what did they reject? This paper will consider Kathleen Butler’s reception of the medievalist Jessie L. Weston (1850-1928), in the form of undergraduate reading and lecture notes (Newnham College, Cambridge, c. 1910). It will also take in the wider impact of Weston, and of her medievalism, in other teaching archives, notably that of Mary Williams, appointed to the Chair of French Language and Literature in Swansea in 1921.

Week 3: 14 May, 12.15-1.50 p.m.

Mark Bedingham Seminar Room, St John’s College

Olivia Russell (Worcester College)

Abstract:

In June 1793, Marie-Jeanne Roland was arrested amidst the political upheavals of the French Revolution. During her five-month imprisonment, she began writing her memoirs: first the Notices historiques, which offer observations and reflections on the Revolution and its leading figures, and then the Mémoires particuliers, which recount her childhood and early adulthood. Although unfinished at the time of her execution in November 1793, these personal memoirs are striking for their candour, particularly in Roland’s revelation that she was sexually assaulted at the age of ten.

Since the first uncensored publication of the Mémoires particuliers in 1864, the account of sexual assault has been subject to problematic interpretation. Some critics have questioned Roland’s non-consent, accused her of embellishment, or read the episode through her admiration of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, assuming she was inspired by his own portrayal of sexual harassment in the Confessions.

This paper challenges such readings by reconsidering Roland’s account on its own terms. It argues that her narrative offers a radical portrayal of non-consent that diverges from contemporaneous understandings of resistance and female virtue. It also reassesses the question of Rousseau’s influence. By situating the account in its original context and tracing its subsequent reception, this paper demonstrates that Roland’s memoirs constitute an original intervention in the autobiographical form, as well as a radical assertion of female voice in an era that sought to constrain it.

Week 7: 11 June, 12.30-2.00 p.m.

Salon, Maison française d’Oxford

Kathryn Banks (Durham University): ‘Rabelaisian Interactions’

Abstract:

Rabelais depicts characters in interaction, including within a strange friendship – between the hero Pantagruel and the joker Panurge – which constitutes, to translate André Tournon, the ‘most controversial aspect’ of Rabelais’s fiction. This friendship has often been interpreted as a vehicle for Bakhtinian dialogism, conceived as an interplay of discourses which undermines authoritative meaning and thus invites readers to participate in the construction of meaning. Tournon showed brilliantly how the diverse perspectives offered by the two friends impact readers’ interpretations of Rabelais. However, from this perspective, dialogism seems to explain away the oddity of the friendship central to Rabelais’s fiction. By contrast, I will suggest that the oddity is the point: Rabelais is interested in not only diversity of perspectives but also how characters negotiate this diversity in interaction. Over the course of his works, Rabelais increasingly experiments with interactive sense-making, particularly across difference. Thus, he is interested not only in epistemology but also in what the cognitive sciences call social cognition – social understanding, or how we make meaning together. Social cognition research has been most famously deployed in literary study in the form of the Theory of Mind model, which foregrounds how we interpret others’ behaviour in terms of their beliefs and desires (Zunshine). By contrast, I draw on the most extensive consideration of social cognition from an interactive perspective, the ‘participatory sense-making’ model, which places at the heart of interaction processes fundamental to much fiction, including Rabelais’s: namely, engaging with difference and negotiating competing genres. At the same time, I return to Bakhtin, for whom dialogism was characteristic of all human interaction, and novels mattered because they revealed the nature of human interaction. My aim is to offer new understanding of Rabelais, as well as reflections on reading with the cognitive sciences.

Convenors: Filippo de Vivo (St Edmund Hall); Leah Clark (Kellogg); Jane Crawshaw Stevens (Brookes); Zoe Farrell (St Edmund Hall); Federica Gigante (History of Science Museum); Giuseppe Marcocci (Exeter); Emanuela Vai (Worcester)

Dates: Tuesdays, Weeks 1, 3, 5 & 7

Time: 4.30 p.m. 

Venue: St. Edmund Hall (see events for weekly venues)

*Term card to be uploaded soon*

Convenors: Sylvia Alvares-Correa (Christ Church), Michael Bax (Magdalene College), Tania Bride (Balliol College), Giuseppe Marcocci (Exeter College), Daniel O’Driscoll (Jesus College), and Glyn Redworth (Exeter College)

Dates: Wednesdays in Weeks 2, 4, 6 & 8

Time: 4.30-6.15 p.m.

Venue: Rector’s Drawing Room, Exeter College

*Term card to be uploaded soon*

Convenors: Ros Ballaster, Christine Gerrard, Nicole Pohl, Tess Somervell, David Taylor, Carly Watson, Abigail Williams

Dates: Tuesdays in Weeks 2, 6 & 8

Time: 5.30 p.m.

Venue: Schwarzman 00.079

*Term card to be uploaded soon*

Conveners: Sir Noel Malcolm and Dr Nuno Castel-Branco

*Term card to be uploaded soon*

Convenors: Nicholas Cronk (St Edmund Hall) and Jacob Chatterjee (New College)

Dates: Wednesdays in Weeks 2, 4, 5, 6, & 8

Time: 5.00 p.m (unless otherwise specified)

Venue: New College, Lecture Room 6 (unless otherwise specified)

An interdisciplinary research seminar supported by the Faculty of History, the  Faculty of Modern Languages, and the Voltaire Foundation

*Term card to be uploaded soon*

Convenors: Sophie Aldred, Colin Donnelly, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Judith Maltby, and Grant Tapsell

Time: Thursdays, 5.00 p.m.
Venue: Pusey Room, Keble College

Week 1: 30 April (followed by drinks)

Dr Colin Donnelly (University of Oxford): ‘Sleeping the Sleep of Death: Radical Afterlife Beliefs in the Early English Reformation’

Week 2: 7 May

Dr Jon Fitzgibbons (University of Lincoln): ‘Bulstrode Whitelocke, the Hebrew Republic, and Kingless Rule in 1650s Britain’

Week 3: 14 May

Dr James Hooks (Ohio State University): ‘Mary Astell’s Marginalia in the Cambridge Collection: Brain Traces and the Formation of Virtue’

Week 4: 21 May

Dr Oscar Patton (University of Oxford): ‘Making the Best of a Bad Job Market: The Social World of Pluralism in the Post-Reformation Cathedral’

Week 5: 28 May

Professor Hilary Bogert-Winkler (University of the South): ‘“The Communion of the Church of England and Ireland”: Independence and Flexible Conformity in the Church of Ireland, 1647–1649’

Week 6: 4 June

Professor Alexandra Walsham (University of Cambridge): ‘Doorways to Heaven? Architecture, Protestant Theology, and the Art of Inscription in Early Modern Britain’

Week 7: 11 June

Dr Braden Zufelt (University of Oxford): ‘Consensus as Orthodoxy: The English Conservative Defence of Transubstantiation in the Early 1520s’

Week 8: 18 June (followed by drinks)

Professor Tara Hamling (University of Birmingham): ‘Faith with a Flourish: Ornament and Visual Experience in Protestant Places of Worship in England, 1560–1700’

Convenors: Clémence Smith and Kathryn Hempstead

Dates: Wednesdays, Weeks 2, 4, 6 & 8

Time: 5.15 p.m.

Venue: Schwarzman 30.020

A friendly and collaborative space for graduate students working on the early modern period across Faculties.

Week 2: 6 May
What is Early Modern?
An interdisciplinary roundtable discussion on how we define the early modern period, and how this shapes our research.
Reading suggestions will be circulated in advance via the mailing list.

Week 4: 20 May
BIHN Crossover
Joint session with the Body in History Network.

Week 6: 3 June
Discussion Group
An opportunity to discuss current research, brainstorm ideas, and plan for the months ahead.

Week 8: 17 June
IEMGW Social
Celebrate the end of the academic year!

Convenors: H. Smith (St. Hilda’s); B. Harris (Worcester); P. Gauci (Lincoln)

Dates: Tuesdays, every week

Time: 4.15 p.m. (with tea and coffee from 4.00 p.m.)

Venue: Beckington Room, Lincoln College or online via Teams (contact perry.gauci@lincoln.ox.ac.uk)

All research students working in this period are encouraged to attend; anyone else interested is very welcome.

*Term card to be uploaded soon*

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-1680-1850/123050627891042  We would be happy to post notices of interest to our group – contact perry.gauci@lincoln.ox.ac.uk

Convenors: Clémence Smith and Ceola Daly

Dates: Tuesdays, Weeks 2, 4, 6, 8

Time: 5.15-7.00 p.m., 

Venue: Schwarzman 10.424

*Term card to be uploaded soon*