Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies
PhD Alumni...Ruth Scobie
“As an initially nervous MA student, I felt so welcomed and motivated by my first semester at CECS that I stayed and finished a PhD! I don’t think there are many places which offer the same combination of a strong community and intellectual ambition – and all in the beautiful and inspiring setting of King’s Manor.”
In 2012 she won the Keats-Shelley Prize for an essay, “Mary Shelley’s Monstrous Explorers: James Cook, James King, and a Sledge in Kamchatka”, published in 2013 in the Keats-Shelley Review; and has also written on the impact of Pacific material culture on the writers William Cowper and Elizabeth Montagu. She is currently completing a monograph, to be called Islands of Celebrity: Oceania and the British Problem of Fame 1770-1830, as well as articles covering criminality and celebrity, Frances Burney and Samuel Foote, and early British (especially Romantic) images of New South Wales.
Ruth completed her doctoral thesis at the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, on London mass culture and its representations of Captain James Cook. She was also co-organiser of Encounters, Affinities, Legacies, an interdisciplinary conference and arts festival about relationships between the eighteenth century and the present day.
Ruth was the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Exploring Celebrity between 2013 and 2015. She is now an Early Career Research Fellow at TORCH.