Tag: Fellows

Lizzie Barratt, Visiting Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History for 2020-21.

As a recent graduate in History of Art and English I have been so excited to have taken up a fellowship with the OCMCH this year. My time as a Visiting Fellow is centred around the artist, poet, and essayist James Smetham, as part of the Centre’s programme to mark the bicentenary of his birth in September 2021.

Smetham was a unique and intriguing figure, a devout Methodist residing on the fringes of the Victorian art scene. The work he left behind is rich and vibrant to study, variable both stylistically and in subject matter. The question of how Smetham ‘fitted’ within the movements of the contemporary art world has been of particular interest to me as an art history enthusiast, as he was friendly with many Pre-Raphaelite figures, and many of his works echo Pre-Raphaelite motifs. However, much also diverts, Smetham’s work often more expressionistic and inward-looking, as well as flip-flopping stylistically in an attempt to create commercially successful works in line with the latest trends.

However, Smetham never fulfilled his artistic ambitions, his life ending in a silent collapse of mental health – some commentators citing his Methodist faith and way of life as grounds for his failure to reach artistic success and mental stability. Questions surrounding the relationships between Smetham’s art, religion and mental health are extremely complicated, and yet seem unavoidable when discussing the artist. Whilst a form of religious melancholia and self-deprecation in his aim towards spiritual growth are undeniably present in Smetham’s personal writings, to view Methodism as a wholly negative influence appears reductionist. Faith and religious wonder also provided joy and artistic inspiration, Methodism and art thus both simultaneously guiding and tormenting him. A non-monolithic and open-ended exploration of these three aspects (religion, art and mental health) and how they intertwined in the artist’s life have been at the forefront of this project – a challenging but important lens through which to better understand Smetham’s work.

The outcome of my fellowship so far has been an introductory online exhibition. It has been challenging to introduce such a complicated figure in a way that does his work justice and speaks to viewers today, but I am extremely proud of what we have produced. Using the Centre’s archive to research for this has been a highlight. The collection of artworks, but also the array of Smetham’s personal musings, letters and ‘squarings’ (which have especially captivated me!) have been an indispensable resource in ‘getting to know’ the artist. Engagement with the collection is something I have continued to enjoy as I have embarked upon transcribing one of the volumes of letters and memoranda. With galleries, museums, and libraries closed for much of last year, I have felt so lucky to be able to continue to engage in art-historical research and study works first-hand. I am extremely grateful to all at the centre for this opportunity, which has given me incredible new experiences and skills that I will take with me on my Masters and beyond – and I can’t wait to keep working on Smetham!

Dr Matteo Bonifacio, visiting Research Fellow in the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History for the spring semester 2019.

I completed my doctoral studies at the University of Turin in May 2018, and I am currently Research Fellow at the Luigi Einaudi Foundation (Turin), where I have been extending my researches into eighteenth-century Britain begun when I was an undergraduate.

My post-doctoral project is on modern British political thought. I am particularly concerned with a specific sort of political language widespread in the late eighteenth century, namely the language of the “rights of man”. As is well-known, the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen in 1789 formally recognized these imprescriptible natural rights and marked a turning point in the history of human rights. In the Age of Revolutions those theoretical discussions about natural rights developed in the seventeenth century by seminal philosophers such as Hugo Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf and John Locke found their way into the political arena, epitomized by their codification in the two declarations.

Whilst scholarship is primarily focused on emphasising the emergence of that language in the French Lumières, I aim to investigate the circulation and usage of the rights of man language in late eighteenth-century Britain. I intend to place special attention on important figures such as Price, Priestley, Paine, and Wollstonecraft, but I am keen to browse primary sources in order to discover marginal authors who also took part in those debates. By adopting an historical perspective from below, I will intertwine plays, songs, novels, and the material history to set the rights of man debates in a broader context.

I am delighted to be a Visiting Research Fellow for the spring semester 2019 at the OCMCH, for it gives me the opportunity to discuss my research with leading historians of the long eighteenth century. The emergence of the rights of man in modern age is not infrequently studied from a secularized standpoint that leads to viewing them as one of the key-features of the so-called “radical Enlightenment”. I am going to inquire as to whether this perspective really does give us a complete understanding of the rights of man in the British context, where religious and political spheres were peculiarly intertwined.

Dr Jérôme Grosclaude, visiting research fellow in the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History for 2017-18, writes of his research for the year;

As a French academic working on Modern British Religious History, and more particularly British Methodism, I’m delighted to having been appointed Visiting Research Fellow at the OCMCH for the current academic year. This allows me to study the fascinating conversion narratives published in The Arminian Magazine, of which issues the OCMCH possesses a complete series. These narratives deal with all sorts of men and women, from many walks of life, and represent a very interesting perspective on the first generations of Methodist communities. Most of the narratives were clearly written and published long after the event, which makes interesting contrast between them and other Methodist narratives written immediately afterwards. Furthermore, being edited by John Wesley from its first issue in 1778 to his death in 1791, the first 165 issues of The Arminian Magazine can also give us an indirect idea of John Wesley’s priorities for his movement and its adherents. So my research endeavours to find similarities and dissimilarities between these conversion narratives, in order to distinguish common patterns.

I have been working on British Methodism for more than ten years now. As a doctoral student at Sorbonne-Nouvelle – Paris III University, my thesis dealt with the question of the Ministry in the relations between the Methodists and the Church of England from the death of John Wesley to the 1970s. My association with the OCMCH dates back to 2009, during this research, and continued after I was appointed to my current position as maître de conferences (i. e. Senior Lecturer) at Clermont Auvergne University in 2012. My other main academic interest is the XIXth-century Church of England and the momentous changes it went through during the Georgian and Victorian eras: being in Oxford is thus an opportunity to (literally!) walk in the footsteps of other important figures of British Christianity such as Thomas Arnold and John Keble.

Simon Lewis, one of the visiting research fellows in the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History for 2016-17, has won a $1000 prize for his article entitled ‘”A Diversity of Passions and Humours”: Early Anti-Methodist Literature as a Disguise for Heterodoxy’ which will be published in Literature & History in May 2017. Simon contributed to the Special Divine Action project, organised jointly by Dr Dan O’Brien (Philosophy) and Prof William Gibson. The project involved six meetings with colleagues from Oxford Brookes and the University of Oxford to promote interdisciplinary debate on the nature of special divine action in the eighteenth century.

The prize was for the best article produced as a result of the project and was awarded by the Ian Ramsey Centre at the University of Oxford’s Faculty of Theology.

Simon Lewis is a doctoral candidate at University College, Oxford.

The aim of my research is to develop the history of Catholic biopolitics, meaning the creation of a doctrine of the Catholic Church concerning the ways in which the different aspects of life are governed. From the mid nineteenth century to 1930, the Congregation of the Roman Inquisition, which had a decisive role in the definition of orthodoxy of Catholic discourse, started to create rules on topics concerning the control of life and body. From the forties onwards it focused on magnetism and hypnosis, birth control methods, surgical-obstetrical therapies for high-risk pregnancies, cremation of the bodies of dead people, human artificial procreation, whereas from the first years of the twentieth century it started to deal with sterilization and eugenics. These topics all had in common the body, and above all the fact that they were the product of a secularized view of the body itself, of life and death. These elements were no longer conceived and governed starting from a religious and Catholic semantics, but they were increasingly interpreted as starting from biomedical knowledge and perspectives.

I’m particularly interested in this change and in the way in which the Catholic Church reacted to the loss of control over the production of the semantics for the government of the body and the health. This interest has pushed me in the last ten years to examine specific aspects of this articulated disciplinary process, from the therapeutic interruption of pregnancy and the artificial insemination, to which I dedicated my first two books, to my last article focused on the discourse concerning birth control, in which emerged a relevant role of the English case for the inquisitorial disciplinary decisions. During my Visiting Fellowship I will work on the interplay between national case, in particular the English one, and this disciplinary process, with particular attention to the reception of the Inquisitorial documents in the medical and religious journals and to the analysis of the role of English Catholics in the eugenics discussions.

Simon Lewis, who is a visiting research fellow in the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History for 2016-17, writes of his research for the year;

During my Visiting Fellowship, I will be completing my doctoral thesis, which is entitled ‘Anti-Methodism as an Aspect of Theological Controversy in England, c.1738-c.1763’. It is well known that Methodism was a divisive phenomenon, which generated a torrent of printed criticism throughout the middle decades of the eighteenth century. While these early polemical attacks on such figures as John Wesley and George Whitefield have gained some scholarly attention, historians have tended to view anti-Methodism as an isolated category of literature. My research aims to address this issue by reintegrating anti-Methodism into the wider theological controversies of the age. More specifically, it considers the way in which these polemics interacted with and informed contemporary debates regarding such issues as Deism, miracles, and Hell.

Much of my time on the Fellowship will be dedicated to completing the final chapter of my thesis, which discusses the use and misuse of history in anti-Methodist polemics. Amongst other things, it investigates why High Church Anglicans often associated Methodists with a wide variety of religious groups (e.g. Puritans, Quakers, and Muslims) that had seemingly little in common. By referring to the polemics of such seventeenth-century authors as Roger L’Estrange and Charles Leslie, it is argued that Methodists were only the latest in a long line of religious ‘enthusiasts’ whom High Churchmen had associated with popery in their polemics. This, along with the fact that many of Wesley and Whitefield’s opponents cited these earlier authors in their tracts, suggests that one should view early anti-Methodist literature as the latest manifestation of these polemical assaults on the Church of England’s ‘enthusiastic’ enemies. Importantly, this will reinforce one of the key points in my thesis – that these debates between Methodists and their opponents should be viewed, not as part of some ‘Great Awakening’ that suddenly occurred in the 1730s, but, rather, as part of the ‘long Reformation’, which continued into the middle decades of the eighteenth century.    

Opportunities to fully immerse oneself in his or her research for weeks at a time are a rare indulgence, at least for those of us who are odd enough to enjoy spending hours in libraries surrounded by books and combing manuscripts that are hundreds of years old. The invitation to be a visiting research fellow at the Centre for Methodism and Church History at Oxford Brookes University allowed me just this sort of opportunity, and I express my appreciation to the Centre and Bill Gibson for providing me with the time and resources that enabled me to continue my work on the literary reception of Methodism in the eighteenth century.

Through the generous support of the Centre, as well as Brigham Young University, I made significant headway on my most recent project, examining the ways critics responded to George Whitefield and Methodism in colonial America. Though extremely popular among the colonists, Whitefield, as he did in Britain, attracted his share of negative press, to which he responded both in print and practice. While much has been written on the anti-Methodist literature produced in Britain, relatively little attention has been paid to anti-Methodism in the American context. The themes and issues raised in response to Whitefield and Methodism in colonial America naturally intersect with many of those raised on the other side of the Atlantic, but my research suggests ways that the hostile literature in America was likewise shaped by America’s unique cultural and religious landscape.

In addition to the resources available at the Centre, my research benefited from holdings at the Bodleian, Rylands, and York Minster libraries, in addition to the Lambeth Palace Library in London, which houses an extensive collection of letters exchanged between the Bishop of London and Anglican clergymen in colonial America who routinely reported on Whitefield’s activities during his American preaching tours. The time spent as a visiting research fellow at the Centre will, in the not-too-distant future, culminate in scholarship that, hopefully, adds to our understanding of the ways non-Methodists responded to the revival in the eighteenth century, and how Methodism was shaped by public disputation.