Research Associates

Tom Almeroth-Williams (cityofbeastslondon@gmail.com) was awarded his York PhD in history on the topic of horses and livestock in Hanoverian London. This research formed the basis of his first book, City of Beasts: How animals shaped Georgian London (MUP, 2019) which he completed as a Research Associate of the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies. In addition to human–animal interactions, his main interests lie in urban life and the world of work in Georgian Britain. Tom is the University of Cambridge’s Research Communications Manager for the Arts & Humanities. He is available for media interviews and consultancy.
Nigel Aston is Reader Emeritus in Early Modern History and Honorary Fellow in the School of History, Politics, and International Relations at the University of Leicester where he taught until 2019. He has received numerous funding awards and held many research posts, most recently as a residential Research Fellow at Durham University in 2019-20. Educated at Durham University and Christ Church, Oxford, Aston has written and published widely on British and French religious, political, and intellectual history in the ‘long’ eighteenth-century. His most recent publication was Negotiating Toleration: Dissent and the Hanoverian Succession 1714-1760 (OUP, 2019), co-edited with Benjamin Bankhurst. His next book Enlightened Oxford: the University in the cultural and political life of Britain and beyond, 1680-1820 is forthcoming in winter 2022-23 from Oxford University Press. He is currently completing the editing of the Yale Boswell Editions The correspondence of James Boswell with the Rev. W.J. Temple, Vol. 2: 1777-1796, and has recently commenced work on a newfive-year project provisionally entitled Cathedrals in society: cultural, political, and religious interactions in northern England, c1660-1800.
Elizabeth Bobbitt (ekb520@york.ac.uk) was awarded her PhD in English Literature from the University of York in 2019. Her research focuses on Ann Radcliffe's "post-1797" texts, posthumously published by Radcliffe's husband in 1826. She is particularly interested in how Radcliffe's later work interrogates Britain's medieval and ancient past. Since completing her PhD, Elizabeth has continued to research and teach, most recently at Schreiner University in Kerrville,Texas. She recently published her first article entitled "The Mist of Death is on Me: Ann Radcliffe's Unexplained Supernatural in Gaston de Blondeville" in Horror Literature from Gothic to Post-Modern: Critical Essays (McFarland Press).
Sharon Choe (sharon.choe@york.ac.uk) completed her PhD at the University of York in 2022. Her thesis, Deformed, Dismembered, and Disembodied: Reinventing the Body Politic in William Blake, examined how Blake adopted and mediated Old Norse motifs and culture to critique the body politic metaphor between 1794 and 1820. During her PhD, Sharon published in Studies in English Literature and VALA: The Journal of the Blake Society. She is currently writing up her first monograph, William Blake, Northern Antiquarianism, and the Body Politic, as well as preparing articles and essays on disability in Blake. Her broad cross-disciplinary research extends into both Norse Reception Studies and Disability Studies, and as a result she also works closely alongside Medieval Studies and the Medical Humanities.
Jessica Clement (jessica.clement@york.ac.uk) completed her BA in English at UCLA and holds both her MA and PhD in English from the University of York. Her thesis explored Elizabeth Singer Rowe’s engagement with poetry as a means to convey various aspects of Dissent and her wider religious community. Following maternity leave, Jessica is currently publishing articles on Dissenting theology, epic poetry, and politics during the years of the Restoration, as well as completing preliminary research for her first monograph on the study of Dissent and women’s writing, looking particularly at the intersection of melancholy and Calvinist theology.
Katie Crowther completed her PhD at the University of York in 2024. Her thesis, "Women's Paper Traces: Material Manuscripts, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Country House," was undertaken in collaboration with the National Trust. Katie has held a fellowship at the Huntington Library in California and has a forthcoming article published in the Women's History Review. She is currently a research assistant on the Elizabeth Montagu Correspondence Online, and her wider interests include letter-writing and material culture in the long eighteenth century.
Holly Day (holly.day@york.ac.uk) was awarded a PhD in History from the University of York in 2023, following a BA at the University of Exeter and a masters at the University of Oxford. Her thesis examined the development of the memorandum book in Georgian Britain, the first kind of commercial pocket diary. Her research spanned the production, use, and cultural status of the genre from the mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. Holly has previously curated an online exhibition on royal inventories; on behalf of the Georgian Papers Programme, and conducted a UKRI-Mitacs funded project on the Canadian diary trade at the University of Toronto. She is currently a pre-award grant officer for the Humanities Research Centre at York and 2024 visiting fellow of the University of Manchester and Manchester Wesley Research Centre, and is working on her first monograph, titled Mem. to Self: Rise of the Pocket Diary in the Transatlantic Print Trade, 1695-1880. Her broader research interests include print culture, life-writing, and manuscript studies.
Matthew Dennison's (matthew.dennison@york.ac.uk) life of Caroline of Ansbach, The First Iron Lady, was published by William Collins in 2017. The first full-length biography since the Second World War of Britain's first Hanoverian queen consort, it drew on primary sources from archives across Europe, including the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, and examined Caroline's role in anglicising the Hanoverian succession, as well as the role of the consort in late-Baroque and early-eighteenth-century court culture. Matthew is the author of nine other biographies, published in more than twenty languages and adapted for radio and, in one case, as a ballet, a former Costa Prize judge and, previously, Douglas Jerrold Scholar at Christ Church, Oxford. His postgraduate research explored porcelain hyacinth-growing vessels produced by the Sevres factory in the 1750s.
Stephanie Howard-Smith (stephanie@howard-smith.com) works on the cultural history of animals in the long eighteenth century. Stephanie completed her PhD exploring the role of lapdogs in eighteenth-century British culture and society at Queen Mary University of London in 2018. Her published work includes essays on a dog cull in 1760 London and porcelain pugs. Stephanie has taught in both the History and English departments at QMUL, was a Teaching Fellow in the History Department at the University of York and has lectured in English at the University of Greenwich. In 2016 Stephanie was the principal curator of an exhibition on animals in the life and art of William Hogarth at Hogarth’s House, London. She has also worked as a research administrator on the AHRC-funded Pet Histories and Wellbeing project.
Frances Long (frances.long@york.ac.uk) completed her PhD on the history of children's sleep in 2022, and then spent a year as a Humanities Research Centre Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of York. Her research focuses on the material culture of children's sleep, and how children's sleep and sleeplessness affected the experience of both adults and children in the long eighteenth century. She is currently working on her first monography.
Charles Martindale (charles.martindale@york.ac.uk) is Chair of the York Georgian Society. He read Literae Humaniores at the University of Oxford, and subsequently took a B Phil in Greek and Latin Languages and Literature there; in 1991 he was awarded a doctorate by publication at the University of Bristol. He taught at the University of Sussex from 1974 to 1988, and then at the University of Bristol, where he was appointed Professor of Latin in 1992 and was from 2009 to 2013, Dean of the Faculty of Arts. He retired from Bristol in January 2013, and from September 2013 joined the York Department of English and Related Languages in a part-time capacity. He was a pioneer of what is sometimes called 'the new Latin'. He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Virgil (1997), and has published widely on Latin poetry from Catullus to Juvenal and on English/Classics literary relations, with books on Milton and Shakespeare. Together with Sarah Annes Brown he has also edited Nicholas Rowe's classic translation of Lucan's Pharsalia (1998). He enjoys collaborative work, and has edited, or co-edited, 8 collections to date, the last being volume 3, 1660-1790, of The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature. From 1993-6 he was Principal Investigator on a 3-year research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust: 'Receptions of Rome in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries'. From 2002-4 he was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to write a monograph Latin Poetry and the Judgement of Taste arguing for the importance of beauty and the aesthetic in our response to the arts, subsequently published by OUP.
Fiona Milne (fiona.milne@york.ac.uk) completed her PhD in English at York in 2019. Her thesis was on the prosecutions of radical writers during the Romantic period. She is currently working on her first book, Romantic Character and the Law: British Radicalism and Self-Defence, 1792-1832, which explores the relationship between literary and legal histories of character in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Fiona has held research fellowships at the Huntington Library (California) and the University of Glasgow Archives and Special Collections. She has taught courses in the Department of English and Related Literature and the Centre for Lifelong Learning at York.
Madeleine Pelling (mp656@york.ac.uk) completed her PhD at York in 2018, and was the recipient of the History of Art Department doctoral scholarship. Her research focuses on material and visual culture in the eighteenth century, with particular emphasis on the history of collecting. She is currently preparing a monograph, The Portland Museum: Collecting, Craft and Conversation, c. 1750 -1786, and has published work in Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Journal 18: a journal of eighteenth-century art and culture and Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Madeleine has taught in the History of Art Department at the University of York, and currently sits as an ECR member on the editorial board for History, journal of the Historical Association. She has held a Georgian Papers Programme Fellowship, a British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies/Queen Mary Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies Early Career Researcher Visiting Fellowship and a Lewis Walpole Library travel grant.
Alice Rhodes (alice.rhodes@york.ac.uk) Alice Rhodes completed her PhD at York in 2021. Her thesis examined speech production in British literature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with a particular focus on the work of Erasmus Darwin, John Thelwall and Percy Bysshe Shelley and she is currently working on her first monograph, The Matter of Speaking: Bodies and Voices in Romantic Literature. More broadly, her research interests include: the intersection between environmental and medical humanities; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century medicine, technology, and life sciences; Romantic era politics; and materialist philosophy. She has taught in the University of York’s Department of English and Related Literature and Writing Centre and has had articles published in Essays in Romanticism and European Romantic Review.
Dustin Risner In 2023, Dustin W. Risner earned his PhD in English and Related Literature from the University of York. His thesis was on "The apocalyptic imaginary during the fin de siècle." Presently located in the Pacific Northwest, he serves as an online instructor in Theology and Literature, a hospital chaplain, and a tour guide. He is actively engaged in publishing chapters and articles based on his thesis, along with conducting new research exploring the apocalyptic themes within 18th-century Gothic literature.
Lilian Tabois (lt1049@york.ac.uk) completed her PhD at York in 2022. Her thesis examined Maria Graham’s historiographical works about South America (1824-1835), analysing these in the light of her early education, her extensive travel experiences, and her wider scholarly and artistic activities and networks. Lilian is currently preparing an article about Graham based on her thesis. Her broader research interests include women’s travel writing, British informal imperialism in Latin America, and women historians. Lilian is an Information Specialist at the University of Groningen Library. She has previously taught courses in the department of English Language and Culture at the University of Groningen.
Yusuke Wakazawa (yw1542@york.ac.uk) is an intellectual historian of eighteenth-century Britain, chiefly of the Scottish Enlightenment, trained in Philosophy and English. He is particularly interested in David Hume as a distinctive man of letters, and discusses him along with representative figures of eighteenth-century literature including James Boswell and Tobias Smollett. He has studied and researched in three countries: the UK (Royal Holloway, University of London and the University of York), the US (New York University), and Japan (Keio University and the University of Tokyo). In 2019, he completed his JASSO-funded doctorate in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. His postdoctoral project aims to trace the intellectual genealogy of the Addisonian model of philosophy and conversation in the long eighteenth century.
Christopher Webster (christopher.webster@york.ac.uk) is an architectural historian who specialises in the buildings of late-Georgian England and has published extensively on the subject. His interests include the development of the architectural profession in the provinces, issues surrounding architectural style, and ecclesiastical architecture in this period – the subject of his PhD. His Late-Georgian Churches: Anglican Architecture, patronage and church-going in England, 1790-1840 was published in 2022 and reached the shortlist for the prestigious Alice Davies Hitchcock award. His current project is the career of the architect Charles Watson, who ‘during the first decade of the nineteenth century … was the leading architect in Yorkshire.’ Following a long career in higher education, he has now retired and enjoys his attachment to the University of York as a basis for his on-going research.
Joanna Wharton (jw597@york.ac.uk) works on literary-scientific cultures of Romantic Britain and Ireland. She gained her MA and PhD in English at York and published her first book, Material Enlightenment: Women Writers and the Science of Mind, 1770-1830(Boydell, 2018), as an Early Career Fellow at Lichtenberg-Kolleg, the Göttingen Institute for Advanced Study. Joanna has essays in the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Journal of Literature and Science, and Anna Letitia Barbauld: New Perspectives (Bucknell, 2013), and is developing a second monograph project on the literary history of optical telegraphy, with a particular focus on the collaborative writings of Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth.