35 episodes

The WPHP Monthly Mercury is the podcast of The Women's Print History Project, a digital bibliographical database that recovers and discovers women’s print history for the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries (womensprinthistoryproject.com). Inspired by the titles of periodicals of the period, the WPHP Monthly Mercury dives into the gritty and gorgeous details of investigating women’s work as authors and labourers in the book trades.

The WPHP Monthly Mercury The WPHP Monthly Mercury

    • Arts
    • 5.0 • 8 Ratings

The WPHP Monthly Mercury is the podcast of The Women's Print History Project, a digital bibliographical database that recovers and discovers women’s print history for the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries (womensprinthistoryproject.com). Inspired by the titles of periodicals of the period, the WPHP Monthly Mercury dives into the gritty and gorgeous details of investigating women’s work as authors and labourers in the book trades.

    Address-ing Firms; or, The Consequences of Our Own Actions

    Address-ing Firms; or, The Consequences of Our Own Actions

    One of the fields we include in our records for publishing, printing, and bookselling businesses in the WPHP—our firm records—is for the addresses where they operated. Sometimes this is straightforward: one individual working at one location for the duration of their career. Other times, however, it is decidedly less so. There are booksellers running multiple shops at the same time, printers moving locations every year or two for fifteen years, publishers working with various combinations of partners and at various addresses over a number of months and years, and any number of other complex business and address relationships that our data struggles to capture.
    Last fall, Kate worked with the WPHP address data for Dublin printer-publisher Alice Reilly—and the address data of the other printers, publishers, and booksellers she appeared in imprints with—to try and trace further material evidence of her labour. In theory, the project was simple and data-driven; in practice, it involved Kandice walking around Dublin filming a video and talking into her phone for an hour so Kate could see the streets she was studying, trying to establish where particular streets may have been located when the cityscape has shifted since the 1750s when Reilly was working, and ultimately had Kate thinking less about addresses and more about the embodiment of labour—Alice Reilly’s, Kandice’s, and her own.
    In episode 3 of season 4 of The WPHP Monthly Mercury, “Address-ing Firms,” join Kate and Kandice as they reflect on the realities of trying to capture this address information, including the decisions that they made for this particular work in 2018 (or was it 2017?) before they really knew what they were doing, what working with the address data for a research project looks like, and a thrilling audio glimpse of Kandice’s Alice-Reilly Dublin walk. 

    • 40 min
    Ghosts of Print Culture Past

    Ghosts of Print Culture Past

    Do you believe in ghosts? In this spirited (ha ha) Halloween episode, Kandice and Kate encounter a ghost of their very own in circulating library owner and author Mary Tuck’s Durston Castle; or, The Ghost of Eleonora (1804). Every year, in anticipation of October, we scour the WPHP for suitably spooky titles—previous Halloween episodes have featured badly behaved monks, rogue banditti, haunted castles, lost (and found!) parents, and pages upon pages of moralizing in the mountains (we’re looking at you, Catherine Cuthbertson’s four-volume Romance in the Pyrenees). Often satirical and rarely scary, these “Gothic” novels we share every year play out many of the tropes of the genre that we expect as readers, including explaining away anything supernatural. So when Kandice realized we might have a real ghost on our hands, well, we couldn’t resist—and a real ghost story demands an audience. 
    Join our intrepid ghost-hunting hosts as they do a reading of Mary Tuck’s tale together and harken back to a common eighteenth-century practice: reading aloud with friends and family. Filled with horrified gasps at the actions of “sanguinous villains,” delighted laughter at descriptions of “brawny thighs,” and inquisitions about how practical it is, really, to throw yourself onto a bed to sleep in full chain mail, this episode engages in a practice of print culture past and reflects on the act itself as much as the spirited tale being shared. 

    • 1 hr 19 min
    New Romanticisms Bonus Episode 5: Kirsteen McCue

    New Romanticisms Bonus Episode 5: Kirsteen McCue

    In August 2022, Kate and Kandice traveled to Liverpool for “New Romanticisms”: the joint conference for the British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism—BARS and NASSR, respectively. Our conference episode involved interviews with conference plenaries, organizers, award winners, and award facilitators, becoming what we've affectionately termed a truly Frankensteinian attempt to answer the question: What do New Romanticisms sound like?
    One answer is that it sounds like even more than what you first heard in our "It's Alive! The WPHP Monthly Mercury at New Romanticisms" episode. Our conversations with the conference plenaries were delightful, brilliant, generous, and wide-ranging, and there was no way for us to include all of the recorded material in one podcast episode of reasonable length. And so we bring you this: a series of bonus episodes containing our full interviews with Jennie Batchelor, Manu Samriti Chander, Noah Heringman, Patricia Matthew and Andrew McInnes, and Kirsteen McCue.

    This fifth (and final) bonus episode features our conversation with Kirsteen McCue. We spoke to her the day she presented her Stephen Copley Memorial Lecture, '"Melodys of Earth and Sky": The National Air and Romantic Lyric.'  Kirsteen McCue is Professor of Scottish Literature and Song Culture and the co-director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow. Most recently, she has edited the fourth volume of the Oxford Edition of the Works of Robert Burns: Robert Burns’s Songs for George Thomson (2021) and a collection of essays titled An Orkney Tapestry (2021).

    • 29 min
    New Romanticisms Bonus Episode 4: Manu Samriti Chander

    New Romanticisms Bonus Episode 4: Manu Samriti Chander

    In August 2022, Kate and Kandice traveled to Liverpool for “New Romanticisms”: the joint conference for the British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism—BARS and NASSR, respectively. Our conference episode involved interviews with conference plenaries, organizers, award winners, and award facilitators, becoming what we've affectionately termed a truly Frankensteinian attempt to answer the question: What do New Romanticisms sound like?
    One answer is that it sounds like even more than what you first heard in our "It's Alive! The WPHP Monthly Mercury at New Romanticisms" episode. Our conversations with the conference plenaries were delightful, brilliant, generous, and wide-ranging, and there was no way for us to include all of the recorded material in one podcast episode of reasonable length. And so we bring you this: a series of bonus episodes containing our full interviews with Jennie Batchelor, Manu Samriti Chander, Noah Heringman, Patricia Matthew and Andrew McInnes, and Kirsteen McCue.

    This episode is our conversation with Dr. Manu Samriti Chander, who gave the unplenary, "'Have These Gentlemen Ever Seen A Revolution?': A Provocation." He is an Associate Teaching Professor at Georgetown University. He is a founding member of The Bigger 6 Collective, and the author of Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century. 

    • 26 min
    New Romanticisms Bonus Episode 3: Patricia Matthew and Andrew McInnes

    New Romanticisms Bonus Episode 3: Patricia Matthew and Andrew McInnes

    In August 2022, Kate and Kandice traveled to Liverpool for “New Romanticisms”: the joint conference for the British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism—BARS and NASSR, respectively. Our conference episode involved interviews with conference plenaries, organizers, award winners, and award facilitators, becoming what we've affectionately termed a truly Frankensteinian attempt to answer the question: What do New Romanticisms sound like?
    One answer is that it sounds like even more than what you first heard in our "It's Alive! The WPHP Monthly Mercury at New Romanticisms" episode. Our conversations with the conference plenaries were delightful, brilliant, generous, and wide-ranging, and there was no way for us to include all of the recorded material in one podcast episode of reasonable length. And so we bring you this: a series of bonus episodes containing our full interviews with Jennie Batchelor, Manu Samriti Chander, Noah Heringman, Patricia Matthew and Andrew McInnes, and Kirsteen McCue.

    This episode is our conversation with Dr. Patricia Matthew, who gave the keynote "Confected Sentimentalism: Motherhood, Poetry, and Abolition," and Dr. Andrew McInnes, organizer of BARS/NASSR 2022: New Romanticisms. Patricia Matthew is an Associate Professor of English at Montclair State University. A founder of the Bigger Six collective, she is the author of Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure (2016). Andrew McInnes is a Reader in English Literature at Edge Hill University, the co-director of the EHU Nineteen research group at Edge Hill University, and the author of Wollstonecraft's Ghost: The Fate of the Female Philosopher in the Romantic Period. 

    • 45 min
    New Romanticisms Bonus Episode 2: Noah Heringman

    New Romanticisms Bonus Episode 2: Noah Heringman

    In August 2022, Kate and Kandice traveled to Liverpool for “New Romanticisms”: the joint conference for the British Association for Romantic Studies and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism—BARS and NASSR, respectively. Our conference episode involved interviews with conference plenaries, organizers, award winners, and award facilitators, becoming what we've affectionately termed a truly Frankensteinian attempt to answer the question: What do New Romanticisms sound like?
    One answer is that it sounds like even more than what you first heard in our "It's Alive! The WPHP Monthly Mercury at New Romanticisms" episode. Our conversations with the conference plenaries were delightful, brilliant, generous, and wide-ranging, and there was no way for us to include all of the recorded material in one podcast episode of reasonable length. And so we bring you this: a series of bonus episodes containing our full interviews with Jennie Batchelor, Manu Samriti Chander, Noah Heringman, Patricia Matthew and Andrew McInnes, and Kirsteen McCue.

    This episode features our interview with Dr. Noah Heringman, who gave the final keynote at BARS/NASSR 2022, titled "Who has priority in deep time?" Noah Heringman is Curator’s Professor of English at the University of Missouri. He is the author of Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology, Sciences of Antiquity: Romantic Antiquarianism, Natural History, and Knowledge Work, and, most recently, A Literary History of Deep Time, which came out in January 2023.

    • 25 min

Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5
8 Ratings

8 Ratings

olan sun ,

Podcast offering a unique perspective

Valuable podcast. Love Kandace!

a_angela ,

I love this show!

The perfect mix of academic and accessible. Highly recommend to anyone interested in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature.

A Brontësaurus ,

Great podcast for the public

Valuable content and easy to follow. A fantastic resource for those who enjoy learning about books produced by women!

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