Dr Richard Coulton, BA (Oxford) MA PhD (London)

Profile

I grew up in North Wales and attended secondary school in Chester before reading English at the University of Oxford and an MA in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Romanticism at Queen Mary. An AHRC-funded PhD followed (under the supervision of Markman Ellis) on horticultural networks and discourse in eighteenth-century London. Since that time I have held a Fellowship in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks (Washington, DC) as well as a number of academic and professional services roles at QMUL and elsewhere. Currently my work tends to explore intersections between digital humanities, plant humanities, and eighteenth-century studies, with particular interests in histories of natural history and the Indian Ocean / East India Company worlds.

I am committed where possible to collaborative work with institutions in the cultural heritage sectors, and have an ongoing research partnership with the Natural History Museum, London. More locally, I design much of my research and teaching alongside Matthew Mauger.

Undergraduate Teaching

I teach or have recently taught on:

• Criticism and Code: Digital Practices for English Studies (ESH6087)
• The Digital Critic (ESH284)
• Digitizing Eighteenth-Century Literature (ESH6059)
• English Research Dissertation (ESH6000)
• Representing London: Writing and the Eighteenth Century City (ESH288)
• Seducing Narratives: Inventing the English Novel (ESH6013)
• Terror, Transgression and Astonishment (ESH264)

Postgraduate Teaching

I teach or have recently taught on:

• English Literature Eighteenth-Century Literature and Romanticism pathway
• ESH7047: Sociability: Literature and the City, 1660-1780

Research

Research Interests:

• networks, communities, and practices of knowledge production in the eighteenth century
• the intellectual and material histories of natural history, in local and global contexts
• landscape, horticulture, and georgic in eighteenth century Britain
• the cultural, social, and imaginative life of the global metropolis, London in particular
• digital humanities methods and approaches

Recent and On-Going Research:

My research focuses on the life and culture of eighteenth century Britain. More particularly, my work explores discourses and practices of natural knowledge during the period, in the context of local and global currents of social negotiation, material exchange, and intellectual production.

I recently edited a special issue of Notes and Records of the Royal Society addressing the life and legacy of the apothecary and naturalist James Petiver (1663-1718) who was an intimate acquaintance of Sir Hans Sloane. Petiver was the subject of a conference I co-ordinated at the Linnean Society in April 2018 to commemorate the tercentenary of his death, as well as the topic of several of my publications including 'Crowd-Sourcing Global Natural History: James Petiver's Museum' (2024) (in Global Exchanges of Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. by James Raven).

I am also collaborating with Charlie Jarvis at the Natural History Museum to research the collecting and commercial activity of James Cuninghame, an East India Company surgeon and factor who was the first European to dispatch botanical and zoological specimens home from China. We have been awarded a a series of grants by Oak Spring Garden Foundation to investigate a series of unique botanical paintings that Cuninghame purchased in Amoy (Xiamen) in 1699 (a parallel grant has supported their digitization by the British Library). We are developing an online image database to explore these visual cultural artefacts and in the longer term are co-writing a biographically structured study of Cuninghame.

My doctoral dissertation examined the status, networks, and writings of professional horticulturists (above all commercial nurserymen) in eighteenth-century London. A journal article summarising the thesis of my PhD was published in The London Journal. Later research (including my work on Petiver and Cuninghame) has explored complementary directions. In collaboration with Markman Ellis and Matthew Mauger I wrote Empire of Tea (2015), a cultural and social history of the beverage in Britain that was reviewed in the London Review of Books and Times Literary Supplement, and has been translated into Mandarin and Japanese. More recently we have updated and condensed aspects of the book's argument in an essay for OUP, 'The History and Roots of Tea'.

In June 2022 I co-organised a major conference titled ‘Tea: Nature, Culture, Society, 1650-1850’ at the Linnean Society. A book project involving collaboration between cultural heritage institutions and university scholars is subsequently in the works with UCL Press, titled Encountering Tea: Histories and objects, 1650–1850 (which I am co-editing with Romita Ray and Jordan Goodman). Stealing Books in Eighteenth-Century London (2016) was another collective endeavour, this time with Chris Reid and Matthew Mauger. My contribution examines the victim-prosecutors of book-theft, and includes material on the technologies of article surveillance and networks of communication implemented by booksellers in order to counter property crime.

Alongside these thematic research interests, I am keen to examine and understand the impact of digital and electronic tools and methods upon the humanities. Stealing Books in Eighteenth-Century London explicitly exploits an online resource, Old Bailey Online, and incorporates a methodological statement that details the search, analysis, and documentation processes that underpin the project. In the last couple of years I have developed undergraduate modules in digital humanities methods. The most ambitious of these, Criticism and Code, aims to equip humanities students with entry-level coding skills in Python and XML, and to generate with them a co-curated digital facsimile and critical edition of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768).

Publications

Supervision

I am interested in supervising doctoral research in areas including digital humanities, garden and landscape studies, plant humanities, and eighteenth-century studies. I am currently supervising the following PhD projects:

• 2017-, Stephen Smith, The Continuation of the Geometric Garden Tradition Among the East India Company Plant Collectors of the 18th and Early 19th Centuries (part-time)
• 2020-, Francesca Murray, English Philanthropy and Fundraising in the Horticultural Industry
• 2021-, India Cole, The Duchess of Botany: Mary Somerset, Jacob Bobart, and the Formation of the Oxford Botanic Garden (AHRC CDP studentship with Oxford Botanic Garden and Arboretum)
• 2021-, Kimberly Glassman, Gender, Botany, and Empire: The Female Transatlantic Information Networks Behind William Jackson Hooker’s Flora Boreali-Americana (1829-1840) (co-supervised with Prof Miles Ogborn at QMUL and with Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew)
• 2021- Brad Scott, Decolonizing the Sloane Herbarium (AHRC CDA co-supervised with Dr Mark Carine at the Natural History Museum, London)
• 2024- Charlotte Brooks, Science, Art, and Culture: Copy Images and the RHS Reeves Collection of Chinese Botanical Paintings (part-time)

I have previously supervised:

• 2017-21, Dr William Burgess, Collection Paratexts: Reconstructing the rhetorical formation of Britain’s public museums in the eighteenth century (supervised with Prof Claire Preston)
• 2021-22, Dr Caitlin Burge, Letters, Networks of Power, and the Fall of Thomas Cromwell, 1523-1547 (lead supervisor during Prof Ruth Ahnert’s leave)