Letters and the Body, 1700-1830: Writing and Embodiment

This collection explores the multifaceted relationship between letters and bodies in the long eighteenth century, featuring a broad selection of women and men’s letters in Britain, North America and the Caribbean, from the labouring poor to the landed elite.

Sarah Goldsmith is a Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. She researches the histories of masculinity, bodies and travel. Her first monograph was Masculinity and Danger on the Eighteenth-Century Grand Tour (2020). She is an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker and consulted on the V&A’s 2022 Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswearexhibition.

Sheryllynne Haggerty is Honorary Research Fellow at WISE, University of Hull. She has published extensively on the economy and networks of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic, including ’Merely for Money’? Business Culture in the British Atlantic 1750-1815 (2012) and Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times: Living the British Empire in Jamaica, 1756 (2023).

Karen Harvey is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Birmingham. She has published extensively on the history of gender, masculinity, sexuality, the home and material culture, including The Little Republic: Masculinity and Domestic Authority in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2012) and The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder: Mary Toft and Eighteenth-Century England (2020).