Society Officers

The Committee represents the membership and is responsible for the running of the Society’s affairs. Members are elected or re-elected every year at the Society’s Annual General Meeting, and the committee meets in January, March and September.

If you are a member of BSECS and are interested in joining the committee, please let one of us know – we are keen to involve the widest range of members in the running of their society. An official call for committee members goes out in April, and voting will take place, if necessary, between September and the AGM in January.

Matthew McCormack

President

Matthew McCormack is Professor of History and Head of the Graduate School at the University of Northampton. He works on the histories of gender, politics and war in Britain, and is currently researching the material culture of men’s shoes.
Karen Lipsedge

Vice-President

Karen Lipsedge is an Associate Professor in English Literature at Kingston University, and her research focuses on eighteenth-century domestic space, interiors, the relationship between objects and people, and the novel. She is the author of Domestic Space in Eighteenth-Century British Novel (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and she is co-editor of ‘At Home in the Eighteenth Century: Interrogating Domestic Space’ (Routledge, 2022). Karen is also part of the Directorate for Student Achievement team at Kingston University, where she works as a Senior Adviser for Teaching and Learning, and has been a member of Kingston University’s Race Equality Self-Assessment Team since 2015 (acting as Chair between 2017-19). Karen recently helped to set up Kingston University’s BAME Staff Network in 2020 and has been the Chair of NEON’s Diverse Learners Group since 2018.
Helen Williams

Secretary

Helen Williams is Associate Professor of English Literature at Northumbria University. She is the author of Laurence Sterne and the Eighteenth-Century Book (2021). Her latest project, in collaboration with the Stationers’ Company, explores women in the book trades in the UK and Ireland.
Paul Stephens

Treasurer

Paul Stephens is an AHRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. His research explores the connections between literature and finance during the long eighteenth century (c.1680-1830). He recently completed a DPhil thesis at Lincoln College, Oxford, on the economic thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Jon Stobart

Assistant Treasurer

Jon Stobart is Professor of Social History at Manchester Metropolitan University. His research focuses on consumption, retailing and domestic material culture in the long eighteenth century. He has recently published an edited open access on Global Goods and the Country House: Comparative Perspectives(2023) and his new book, Life in the Georgian Parsonage: Morals, Material Goods and the English Clergy, will be published in autumn 2024.
Declan Kavanagh

Equality, Inclusion and Diversity Officer

Dr Declan Kavanagh is a Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Studies in the School of English at the University of Kent. He is the author of Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain (2017). His research interests bring together queer studies, disability studies & the literary history of sexuality upon the terrain of anglophone eighteenth-century studies. Pronouns are he/him/his.
Brycchan Carey

Past President

Brycchan Carey is Professor of English at Northumbria University. His research focuses on the literature and culture of the Atlantic world in the long eighteenth century, in particular, cultures of slavery, abolition, and the environment.
Kate Tunstall

JECS Editor

Kate Tunstall is Fellow and Tutor in French at Worcester College, University of Oxford. Her published work includes the monograph Blindness and Enlightenment (2011); the edited collection Self-Evident Truths? Human Rights and the Enlightenment (2012); and the translation (with Caroline Warman) of Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew (2014) for the multi-media on-line edition, which won the BSECS Digital Resources Prize in 2014. Her current book project is entitled Writing Matter and Dressing Gowns.
Emrys Jones

JECS Reviews Editor

Emrys Jones is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture at King’s College London. His research is principally concerned with sociability, politics and privacy in the early eighteenth century.
Adam J. Smith

Criticks Editor

Adam J Smith is a senior lecturer in eighteenth-century literature at York St John University. His research explores eighteenth-century print culture, with a particular interest in political periodicals and works of protest and satire.
Matthew Grenby

International Officer

Matthew Grenby is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at Newcastle University. He works chiefly on children’s books, political fiction, and the culture of 18^th-century elections.
Stephanie Howard-Smith

Centres and Associate Societies Officer

Stephanie Howard-Smith is a postdoctoral research assistant at King’s College London where she is working on the history of anosmia (loss of smell). Her research focuses on the cultural and social history of human-dog relations during the long eighteenth century.
Alice Marples

Heritage and Public Engagement

Alice Marples is Research and Postgraduate Development Manager at The British Library and works to foster collaborative collections-based research and engagement across the cultural heritage and higher education sectors. Her own historical research focuses on the history of scientific and medical collections in Britain, focusing on the relationship between commerce, scholarship, and state. Her first monograph is entitled The Transactioneer: Hans Sloane and the Rise of Public Natural History (forthcoming).
Meg Kobza

Conference Domestic Organiser

Meg Kobza is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Newcastle University. Her work focuses on issues of race, empire, and otherness within the context of leisure culture in the British Empire, interrogating how the commercialisation of costumed entertainments was instrumental in establishing and spreading practices of cultural appropriation.
Brianna E. Robertson-Kirkland

Conference Academic Organiser

Brianna is a lecturer of historical musicology at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and is a Research Associate on The Collected Works of Allan Ramsay project at the University of Glasgow. Alongside Professor Murray Pittock, she is the co-editor of Ramsay’s Tea-Table Miscellany. She works on singers, song, and music education in the long eighteenth century.
James Harriman-Smith

Awards Officer

James Harriman-Smith lectures at Newcastle University, where he specializes in the theatre of the Restoration and long eighteenth century.
Rachel Bynoth

Postgraduate/ECR Representative

Rachel Bynoth is a PhD candidate in History at Bath Spa University. Her research focuses on expressions of anxiety and its role in distance relationships in the long eighteenth-century, through the letters of the Canning family. She is also an Associate Lecturer at Bath Spa University and University of the West of England.
Alex Hobday

Domestic Conference Organiser

Alex Hobday is an early career researcher, specializing in eighteenth-century and Romantic literature. His PhD project explored the link between happiness and different conceptions of the self in autobiographical works from the period. His second project examines the relationship between ideas of virtue, markets, and literary form across the long eighteenth century
Gillian Williamson

Membership Officer

Gillian Williamson is an independent scholar researching eighteenth-century social and cultural history. She received her doctorate from Birkbeck, University of London, as a mature student having in a previous life read Classics. She has published on vestry politics in Westminster, the Gentleman’s Magazine and masculinity, and life in lodgings in Georgian London. Gillian is involved in the Women’s Studies Group 1558-1837 and is a convenor of the IHR seminar British History in the Long Eighteenth Century.
Sarah Fox

Communications and Media Officer

Sarah Fox is a social and cultural historian with interests in the social histories of law and medicine, the body, gender, food, and community. She is currently co-authoring a book on George III, his dining habits, and understandings of Britishness in the late eighteenth century, and is in the early stages of developing a new project exploring trust in eighteenth-century England.
Hardeep Dhindsa

Postgraduate/ECR Representative

Hardeep Dhindsa is a PhD candidate in Classics at King’s College London. His research exposes the subtle relationships between whiteness, British identity, Greco-Roman antiquity, and colonialism as depicted in painting from 1756-1815. He is also an illustrator who uses colour to disrupt narratives of whiteness in the pristine classical marble collections in museums across Europe.
Katie Snow

Communications and Media Officer

Katie Snow is a medical historian currently working across the University of Exeter and the University of Plymouth. Her research focuses on the intersections between art, anatomy, and humour.
Katie Noble

Postgraduate/ECR Representative

Katie Noble is Leverhulme Doctoral Scholar in English at Christ Church, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the mediation of eighteenth-century actresses’ performance in theatrical ephemera. The project works exclusively with the F. B. Brady Collection of theatrical ephemera at Christ Church Library.
Emma Pearce

Postgraduate/ECR Representative

Emma Pearce is a PhD candidate in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh, funded by BSECS. Her research examines tartan and identity in the British empire during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Emma’s wider interests lie in the global interconnections of textiles, constructions of the body, and fusions of culture.

Society Officers

Matthew McCormack

Karen Lipsedge

Helen Williams

Paul Stephens

Jon Stobart

Declan Kavanagh

Brycchan Carey

Kate Tunstall

Emrys Jones

Adam J. Smith

Matthew Grenby

Stephanie Howard-Smith

Alice Marples

Meg Kobza

Brianna E. Robertson-Kirkland

James Harriman-Smith

Rachel Bynoth

Alex Hobday

Gillian Williamson

Sarah Fox

Hardeep Dhindsa

Katie Snow

Katie Noble

Emma Pearce