Skip to main content
School of the Arts
  1. School of the Arts
  2. Research
  3. Department Research
  4. English
  5. English Research Centres
  6. Queen Mary Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies
  7. Research Seminar

Research Seminar

 

QMCECS offers a programme of early evening seminars with speakers from a range of disciplines. We have six seminars a year, and recent speakers have included Rebecca Anne Barr (Cambridge), Nigel Leask (Glasgow), Karen Harvey (Birmingham), and Fara Dabhoiwala (Princeton).

For a list of speakers in the last five years see the seminar archive.

Spring 2026 Programme

03/02/2026: Emma Newport (Sussex). Silence at the Tea Table: Abolition, Empire and The Woman of Colour (anon., 1808).

17/02/2026: Esther Chadwick (Courtauld). Art, bureaucracy and the Stamp Office at Somerset House.

03/03/2026: Richard Coulton and Matthew Mauger. Manuscript Journeys: Locating Lives and Data in East India Company Ship’s Logs.

31/03/2026: Rebecca Tierney-Hynes (Edinburgh): Richard Steele and the Corps of Comedy.

This paper explores the relationship between mourning and comedy in Steele’s 1701 play, The Funeral. It argues that Steele conceives of national renewal and the cohesion of the body politic as dependent on the sacrifices of war. Punning on the various eighteenth-century meanings of ‘corps’, it uses the fictive corpse at the centre of Steele’s comedy to understand his insistence on mourning as the underpinning of comedy’s joyful generativity. 

Please note that Rowan Boyson’s seminar, originally scheduled for 17 March has been postponed until 28 April. 

14/04/2026: Jonathan Sachs (Concordia): Slow Time and the Temporal Culture of William Cowper’s The Task.

This paper examines William Cowper’s The Task (1785) through the lens of what it calls temporal culture—the ensemble of practices, values, and rhythms through which societies experience and interpret time. Cowper’s poem emerges at a historical moment when competing understandings of time were coming into view: the accelerating tempo of commercial society and print culture on the one hand, and new geological accounts of the earth’s vast antiquity on the other. Rather than presenting a simple retreat from its present moment, The Task stages a complex interplay between faster and slower temporalities. Domestic repose, contemplative walking, and the patient labor of gardening offer figures of “slow time,” yet these practices remain entangled with the very forces of acceleration they appear to resist. By tracing Cowper’s engagement with newspapers, natural philosophy, and horticulture, the paper argues that slowness functions not merely as a reaction to speed but as one of the conditions through which modern temporal consciousness takes shape. Reading The Task in this way reveals Cowper's poetry as a privileged site for registering the contradictions of late eighteenth-century temporal experience.

In Person: QMUL Mile End Campus. ArtsOne, Room 1.36 (entrance from the rear of the building). 

28/04/2026: Rowan Boyson (KCL): Who owns the wind? Air, commons and aesthetics - Francis Bacon to William Hazlitt. 

All seminars Tuesdays 17:15–19:00 unless otherwise stated. 

Location: QMUL Mile End Campus.

 

Back to top