EDUCATION AND RESEARCH
THE LIBRARY AND THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON
Introduction
Chawton House Library has established close academic links with the University of Southampton. The University has considerable strengths in the fields of women's writing, history, and the visual and material culture of the long eighteenth century.
At the early stages of the project, Professor Cora Kaplan, an internationally recognized scholar in the field of late eighteenth-century women's writing, joined trustee Professor Isobel Grundy in providing overall strategic, mentoring, and intellectual guidance to the project.
Dr Stephen Bygrave, Reader in English at the University of Southampton, became director of the Southampton link with Chawton in 2007. Stephen also set up and convenes the University’s Chawton MA in Eighteenth-Century Studies. He has published two books on Coleridge, an introductory textbook on Romanticism, a study of the American theorist Kenneth Burke and articles and reviews in the period of the long eighteenth century. A study of educational theory in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century is forthcoming from Bucknell University Press. He has been involved with the Chawton link from the start and, with Stephen Bending, is General Editor of the multi-volume Chawton House Library Series, published by Pickering and Chatto. Their edition of Women’s Travel Writings in Revolutionary France came out in 2007.
Professor Emma Clery was appointed as Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at Southampton University in 2005. Emma Clery has published widely, and her most recent book is The Feminization Debate in
Eighteenth-Century England: Literature, Commerce and Luxury (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). She is currently working on two projects, one on the problem of 'effeminacy' in eighteenth-century culture, the other on the remaking of the English novel from Burney to Austen. Some current work by her students at Southampton on texts in the Chawton collections can be seen in the Further information section.
