Abigail Williams will be taking eighteenth-century literature out of the archive, and into twenty-first century entertainment settings. Working on a project to catalogue the contents of popular 18C poetic anthologies, she became increasingly curious about whether anyone would enjoy those works now. With names like 'Laugh and be Fat', or 'The Christmas Box: A Compleat System of Festive Gambols', these anthologies were a hotchpotch of songs, riddles, short stories and (bad) jokes designed to cheer and comfort their readers through all those long eighteenth century evenings without TV, radio, Xboxes or iPads. If we were able to step inside the parlours, drawing rooms or sitting rooms of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century we'd find homes busy with home-made culture -- book groups and tea table parties; amateur dramatics; groups of women reading and weeping their way through popular sentimental fiction, or proudly sharing their scrapbooks of favourite poems and stories; children stumbling through poems before their maiden aunts, and men at punch parties singing songs about farts and dogs. We used to read aloud, and we used to read together, and the books Abigail studied were the material evidence of that culture. In this session, Dr Williams will talk about her experiences of working with musicians and cultural venues - museums, theatres, music festivals - to bring this lost history back to life, for modern audiences. About the Speaker Abigail has been a Fellow at St Peter's since 2001, shortly after she finished her doctorate, which was on politics and literature in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, and in particular, the development of Whig literary culture in that period. Dr Williams is also interested in Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; textual criticism; eighteenth century poetic miscellanies and popular reception history; obliteration and the revision of eighteenth century texts. At St Peter's Abigail teaches undergraduate courses in the period 1640-1832, and the Shakespeare paper. In the Faculty, she lectures on Restoration comedy, High and Low Culture, Pope, Swift, Montagu, Behn and Rochester. Along with Ros Ballaster, Christine Gerrard, and David Womersley, the Fellow has also recently started teaching a third year syndicated option on 'Grub Street', which explores the ephemeral productions of the early eighteenth century alongside more canonical texts. About Engaging with the Humanities As part of a great university, the School aims to make the wider intellectual richness of Oxford available to its students and staff in various ways. One such way is to engage with issues in the study of the humanities. The work of historians, philosophers, and classicists, and the study of literature and artefacts from many countries and traditions, can shed light on challenges that concern business school students. The study and performance of drama and music can develop perspectives on communication that will be valuable in other contexts, including the corporate and government worlds. Saïd Business School works with a number of Oxford's leading humanities scholars in a series of activities to which we give the broad title "Engaging with the Humanities". This series of events is a part of that, and open to all members of the business school, university and wider community. www.sbs.oxford.edu/events

• published: 24 Feb 2014
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