Markman Ellis, MA (Auckland) PhD (Cambridge)

Professor of Eighteenth-Centutry Studies
Tel: +44 (0)20 7882 8523
email: m.ellis@qmul.ac.uk

Research interests

Eighteenth-century English literature and culture
London and literature
Sensibility and women's writing in the eighteenth century
Representations of slavery and empire in the eighteenth century

Markman Ellis's research concerns eighteenth-century literature and culture in English. His recent research has focussed on the representation of the coffee-house in the period 1650-1750, with a monograph entitled The Coffee-House: a cultural history published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in November 2004. He has recently completed a four-volume facsimile edition of coffee-house satires (1657-1780) for Pickering and Chatto. His first book was a study of political controversy in sentimental novels, entitled The Politics of Sensibility (Cambridge University Press, 1996, now in paperback), which developed an argument about the feminisation of culture in eighteenth-century Britain. He has also published The History of Gothic Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2000); and co-edited Discourses of Slavery and Abolition (Palgrave, 2004). Other topics within eighteenth-century studies that he has addressed in articles and chapters include: georgic poetry and ideas of empire; travel writing and the rhetoric of wonder; slavery and sensibility. His current research is a project on what it means to be a critic in the early eighteenth century, entitled The Social Space of Criticism.

Recent publications

Eighteenth Century Coffee House Culture, 4 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006)

The Coffee House: a cultural history (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004)

The History of Gothic Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000)

Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Writing in Britain and its Colonies 1660-1832 , ed Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis, and Sarah Salih, (London: Palgrave, 2004)

‘Trade and Slavery', in Jane Austen in Context, ed by Janet Todd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)

‘Georgic Poetry and the problem of unfree labour', in Discourses of Slavery and Abolition, ed by Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis, and Sarah Salih (London: Palgrave, 2004)

‘Islands of empire: the West Indies in eighteenth century georgic and pastoral poetry', in Islands in History and Representation, ed by Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith (London: Routledge, 2003), pp 120-42

‘Ignatius Sancho's Shandean sentimental letters and the politics of form', in "Genius in Bondage": Literature of the Early Black Atlantic, ed. by Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), pp 44-68

‘The coffee-women, The Spectator and the public sphere in the early-eighteenth century', in Women and the Public Sphere, ed by Elizabeth Eger and Charlotte Grant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp 27-52

‘Pasqua Rosee's Coffee House 1652-1666', London Journal, 29: 1 (2004), 1-25

‘The Coffee-house, a discursive model', in A Coffee-House Conversation on the International Art World and its Exclusion , ed by Hatice Abdullah and Geoff Cox (“http://www.kahve-house.com/society/”, PDF format; London: Kahve-Society, 2002)

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