Birkbeck Eighteenth-Century Reading Group

Core Reading: ‘The Microscope’, ‘Female Inconstancy Display’d in three Diverting Histories’ (1732), pp. 41-43. For the text, and any further details, please contact Luisa Calè, l.cale@bbk.ac.uk.

Introduced by Tita Chico (University of Maryland), with responses from Katy Barrett (Royal Museums Greenwich), and Richard Dunn (Royal Museums Greenwich)

Tita Chico is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland. She is currently working on ‘Experimentalism: Literary Knowledge and Science in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, a study of literary celebrations of and alternatives to the epistemology of experimental philosophy. She is the author of ‘Designing Women: The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture’ (2005), co-editor of ‘Atlantic Worlds in the Long Eighteenth Century: Seduction and Sentiment’ (2012), and Editor of ‘The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation’, a University of Pennsylvania Press quarterly.

Katy Barrett is Curator of Art, pre-1800 at Royal Museums Greenwich, and a founder of the Things seminar at CRASSH in Cambridge, where she was part of the Board of Longitude Project, working on its cultural history through the lens of William Hogarth. She has published a Look First feature on this, entitled ‘Looking for the Longitude’.

Richard Dunn is Senior Curator for the History of Science at Royal Museums Greenwich. He was co-curator of ‘Ships, Clocks & Stars: The Quest for Longitude’, a major international touring exhibition shown at the National Maritime Museum in 2014 and now at the Australian National Maritime Museum. Between 2010 and 2015 he worked on the history of the Board of Longitude in collaboration with the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge (www.rmg.co.uk/longitude). His publications include ‘The Telescope: A Short History’ (2009) and ‘Finding Longitude’ (2014, with Rebekah Higgitt).