Abstract: A review of Small Things in the Eighteenth Century: The Political and Personal Value of the Miniature , edited by Chloe Wigston Smith and Beth Fowkes Tobin, a collection of seventeen essays focusing on the cultural history and impact of small objects, or things, and their outsized but often overlooked significance in the personal, political, economic, cultural, and scientific shifts occurring in Europe during the eighteenth century.
Abstract: A review of Melissa Bailes's Regenerating Romanticism: Botany, Sensibility, and Originality in British Literature, 1750–1830 .
Abstract: We are entangled with insects in extraordinary ways. They facilitate much critical thinking. Yet the facts of insect existence challenge human cognition. Critical Insect Studies arises to address the human/insect assemblage, with work under this rubric already underway. At the same time, our current understanding of insects owes much to nascent eighteenth-century scientific practice.
Abstract: A review of Catherine Ingrassia's Domestic Captivity and the British Subject, 1660–1750 (2022), which examines how literary representations of domestic captivity shaped cultural understandings of confinement, restraint, and subjection both at home and abroad.
Abstract: A review of Rebekah Mitsein's African Impressions: How African Worldviews Shaped the British Geographical Imagination across the Early Enlightenment (2023).
