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Professor Markman Ellis, MA (Auckland) PhD (Cambridge)
Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies

email: m.ellis@qmul.ac.uk
Phone: 0207 882 8523

Research interests:

Research interests:

• Eighteenth-century English literature and culture
• Eighteenth-century London
• Criticism and intellectual culture in the eighteenth century
• 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 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). His published a monograph entitled The Coffee-House: a Cultural History (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) in 2004, which focussed on the representation of the coffee-house in the period 1650-1750. The research for this book formed the basis of a four-volume facsimile edition of coffee-house satires (1657-1780) for Pickering and Chatto entitled Eighteenth-Century Coffee House Culture (2006). He was general editor of the Queen Mary Tea Project, which produced a four volume edition of texts on tea and its cultures entitled Tea and the Tea-Table in Eighteenth-Century England (Pickering and Chatto, 2010) Other topics within eighteenth-century studies that he has addressed in articles and chapters include: panoramas and 1790s spectacle in London; natural history and museums; 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.

Publications:

Books:

The Coffee House: a Cultural History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004). Paperback published by Orion in 2005.

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

The Politics of Sensibility: race, gender and commerce in the sentimental novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)

 

Editions and edited collections

Prostitution and Eighteenth-Century Culture: Sex, Commerce and Morality, ed. by Markman Ellis and Ann Lewis (London: Pickering and Chatto, forthcoming 2012) 

Tea and the Tea-Table in Eighteenth-Century England, 4 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010)

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

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

Articles

‘Coffee-house Libraries in Mid Eighteenth-Century London’, The Library: Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 10: 1 (March 2009), pp. 3-40

‘Coffee-House Library Short-title Catalogue’, Bibliographical Society: Electronic Publications, online pdf publication <http://www.bibsoc.org.uk/electronic-publications.htm>

‘Enlightenment or Illumination: the spectre of conspiracy in gothic fictions of the 1790s’, in Charlotte Sussman and Jillian Heydt-Stevenson (eds), Recognizing the Romantic Novel: New Histories of British Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008)

‘An introduction to the coffee-house: a discursive model’, Language and Communication, 28: 2 (2008)

‘“Spectacles within doors”: panoramas of London in the 1790s’, Romanticism, 14: 2 (2008)

‘Suffering Things: Lap-dogs, slaves and counter-sensibility’, in The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. by Mark Blackwell (Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press, 2007)

‘Poetry and the City’, in The Blackwell Companion to Eighteenth Century Poetry, ed. Christine Gerrard (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006)

‘Trade', 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), 1-21

‘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, PDF format (London: Kahve-Society, 2002)

Professional activities and outreach: