King's College Summer GPP Fellows Announced!

We are delighted to announce the award of the King’s Summer Fellowships in the Georgian Papers Programme for 2019, who emerged from a very strong field of applications. The 2019 fellows take the number of researchers who have held a fellowship of some kind with the Programme over 50 (for a full list, see here), covering a wide range of research themes.
 

Paige Emerick is a studying for a PhD at the University of Leicester, having  previously studied at the Universities of Derby and Sheffield. Her PhD thesis builds on a long-standing interest in the later Hanoverian royal family through analysing royal visits within Britain between 1760-1830. One of her key objectives is to analyse how royal visits impacted on relationships between the localities and the crown.  By cross-referencing locally produced sources often held in regional archives such as diaries and letters of local inhabitants, newspapers, and material culture produced to commemorate the visits, with  the evidence of private correspondence of courtiers and documents in the Royal Archives, her project will examine how the royal family and local communities understood one another. Her thesis explores how the increased visibility of, and proximity to, the royal family on these visits shaped both local and national identities and public attitudes towards the monarchy. Concentrating on the reigns of George III and George IV allows for intergenerational comparison of royal visits and approaches to kingship, as well as identifying emerging royal rituals and protocols. Drawing upon a range of case studies allows consideration of variations reflecting influential factors such as regionality, the purpose of visits, and the personality of individual royals. Her research also explores the organisation and expenses associated with royal visits to discover the level of prior planning and the reasoning behind the choices of location, accommodation, activities and attendees.
 

Matthew McCormack is professor of History at the University of Northampton, and his written widely on later Hanoverian Britain, his most recent publication being Citizenship and Gender in Britain 1688-1928 (Routledge, 2019). With his fellowship he will be researching shoes and buckles at the Georgian court. Shoes were loaded with ideological meaning in the eighteenth century, so footwear choices could make a political statement, especially those worn by people in the public eye. In particular, he is interested in the 1790s, when there was a shift away from the traditional elite ensemble of breeches, stockings and buckled shoes, towards trousers and boots. The former came to be associated with the excesses of the aristocracy, whereas the latter connoted martial masculinity and democracy. The buckle’s fall from fashion was disastrous for manufacturers in areas such as Birmingham, who petitioned the royal family to continue requiring them at court and in the military. This project therefore highlights an episode in the political history of footwear, and forms part of a wider project on the material culture of Georgian shoes.