Markman Ellis
Markman Ellis is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at Queen Mary University of London. A New Zealander, he studied at Waipapa Taumata Rau / University of Auckland, and completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge. His work focuses on the cultural history of eighteenth-century British literature and history, especially the legacies of empire and race. He is the author of The Politics of Sensibility: race, gender and commerce in the sentimental novel (1996), The History of Gothic Fiction (2000), The Coffee-House: a Cultural History (2004), Empire of Tea (2015), and Science and Reading in the Eighteenth Century: the Hardwicke Circle and the Royal Society, 1740-1766 (2023). He co-edited Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Writing in Britain and its Colonies 1660-1832 (2004) and has published essays on Ignatius Sancho, slave narratives, and eighteenth-century Caribbean poetry. He is currently working on an edition (with Nicole Aljoe) of The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African, first published in 1782.
The project
Title: Race and slavery in eighteenth-century Britain
Hosting institution: EHESS
Selective bibliography
Science and Reading in the Eighteenth Century: the Hardwicke Circle and the Royal Society, 1740-1766 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).
“Pray send back this foul proof”: Thomas Birch and the correction of Elizabeth Carter’s Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explain’d for the Use of the Ladies (1739), Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 55, no. 3 (2022), pp. 277–98
‘Time and the Essay: The Spectator and Diurnal Form’, in Of Essays: Montaigne to the Present, ed. by Tommy Karshan and Katie Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 97-112.
‘The English Mercurie hoax and the early history of the newspaper’, Book History, 22 (2019), pp. 100-132.
‘Narratives of Resistance in the Literary Archives of Slavery’, in The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing, ed Susheila Nasta and Mark Stein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 25-39.
