Projects

Projects – coordination, consultancy & conversation

“Most Sacred Things​”: The correspondence of William Hayley

I was an advisor to this pilot digital edition of the correspondence of William Hayley at the Fitzwilliam Museum (2021). The project was funded by the British Academy and the University of Cambridge.

With Lisa Gee and Mark Crosby, I co-convened a virtual conference to mark the bicentenary of Hayley’s death in November 2020. The event was funded by the Paul Mellon Centre and the Association for Art History.

Further details of the pilot project and conference can be found on the project website.

Lives of Letters

I co-founded and ran the Lives and Afterlives of Letters Network with Florence Impens, Katharina Keim, Alice Marples and Oscar Seip at the John Rylands Research Institute between 2017 and 2019.

The network focused on methods and best practice in the study of correspondence across all time periods, locations, languages and media. We grew the network into the Manchester Centre for Correspondence Studies in 2019, which is now run by academic staff at the University of Manchester.

Details of our activities can be found on the network blog.

One of my extra-curricular contributions to the network was compiling a Spotify playlist Songs about Letters, with tracks crowdsourced from the network community.

Visionary artists, Visionary objects (1800–now)​

I co-founded this international network with Lieke Wijnia. We held a pilot workshop in Manchester in February 2018, and have since presented panels at an international conference and a research symposium.

Further details can be found on the network blog.

Louise Gardam – Infinity Series

Since 2016, I have been in conversation with the artist Louise Gardam, about her current body of paintings, The Infinity Series (2014–2020). I presented a paper on the paintings at the International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture’s conference in 2016, and continue to converse with Louise about her latest work.