About us

Kurt is a second-year history PhD student at the University of York. He focuses on the military culture of the Kaiserlich-königliche Armee during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, social militarisation, conscription and the effects of military processes and practices on gender, regional identity, peasant society and dynastic loyalty in the Austrian Hereditary Lands.

Sharon is a second-year literature PhD student at the University of York. Her research addresses how Old Norse culture and motifs are reworked in William Blake's illuminated books into the disabled and deformed bodies found throughout his poetry. Broadly speaking, she is interested in how Disability Studies can initiate new discourses in eighteenth-century and Romantic scholarship. Her research interests also include the history of science and medicine, the myth of 'national identity', and Northern Antiquarianism in the long eighteenth century.

Holly is a second-year history PhD student at the University of York. She researches the history of the pocket memorandum book in Britain, examining its development as a print product and the ways in which it shaped life-writing in the long eighteenth-century. Her project considers how gendered, occupational, provincial and national identities were marketed and constructed in print and practice. Research interests include the middling sorts, early modern diaries and book history and ephemera, as well as the heritage industry and public history.

Rachel is an MA student at the University of York. She is currently exploring the impact of illness and health on gender, self-fashioning and representation in the mid eighteenth-century. Her research interests includes the production, use and consumption of science, technology and natural knowledge by women of the middling sort; letters from women prisoners and cultures of civility in the press in Jamaica.

f.kavanagh@student.unimelb.edu.au| @FrancescaKav

Francesca Kavanagh is a PhD candidate in the department of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women’s reading and writing practices with a particular interest in material culture. Her current project examines the production of spaces of intimacy in women's letter-writing, annotation, and manuscript books in the long eighteenth century. Her research interests also include the gothic, and cultures of celebrity and fandom from Romanticism to the present.