Project Director
Dr Adam James Smith
Adam is an Associate Professor of English Literature at York St John University. His work explores the role played by cheap print in mediating the relationship between the citizen and the state in the long eighteenth century. He has published on the work Eliza Haywood, Joseph Addison, Jonathan Swift, James Montgomery and Virginia Woolf, amongst others. He co-edited Print Culture, Agency and Regionality in the Hand Press Period (Palgrave, 2022), People of Print: Seventeenth Century England (CUP, 2023) and the forthcoming volumes Impolite Periodicals (Bucknell, 2024) and People of Print: Eighteenth Century England (CUP, 2024). He is Chief Editor of BSECS Criticks and the co-editor of the eighteenth-century pages of the journal Literature Compass. He is also co-director of the York Research Unit for the Study of Satire and co-host of the ongoing monthly podcast Smith & Waugh Talk About Satire. Follow Adam on Twitter/X.
Editorial Team
Maddison Warley
Maddison is a second year English Literature student who counts Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote as her favourite eighteenth-century text. Maddison says “there are so many underrated female authors in the Eighteenth Century, so it’s been incredibly rewarding (and often emotional) to help bring the words of one of them to a wider audience.” Maddison is also co-host of Dogeared: A Bookish Podcast and Secretary of the YSJ Dead Poets Society.
Charanjoth Batth
Charanjoth is a second year English Literature student who was drawn to the project after studying Eliza Haywood’s novella Fantomina on the module Dawn of Print. Charanjoth says “studying Fantomina showed me how genuinely enjoyable (and scandalous) eighteenth-century literature can be!”
Lauren Wilson
Lauren is a second year English Literature student who was drawn to the project after first encountering Eliza Haywood via her novella Fantomina. “I just love the drama, scandal and outrageousness of Fantomina“, Lauren says. “I’m happy we’ve played a part in sharing Haywood’s work. We have all worked very hard to make it accessible to everyone with an interest in eighteenth-century literature.”
Hannah Roberts
Hannah is a second year English Literature and Film Studies student who, though new to the eighteenth century, is an avid reader of modern print culture (especially Total Film Magazine).
Production Team
Charlotte Tunks
Charlotte is an postgraduate student on the York St John University MA in Publishing. Charlotte’s favourite eighteenth-century literature is La Belle at la Bête, an original variation of Gabriella-Suzanne Barbot de Villenuve’s Beauty and the Beast (1740).
Lauren Fenton
Local artist Lauren Fenton is a qualified illustrator, known for her contemporary treatment of historical works. She has produced popular art based on British folklore and obscure eighteenth-century texts, such as Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote. Her keen interest in introducing lesser-known texts to modern audiences makes her ideal for this project. Furthermore, her ability to blend the real and the absurd makes her an especially appropriate fit for Haywood’s periodical (a paper which claims to present serious news and opinion but has been edited by a parrot!).