Dr Ruth

My research investigates eighteenth and early nineteenth century ideas of fame and celebrity in a global context, with a particular focus on the Cook voyages and their circulation in British print and material culture. I’ve also written on the impact of Oceania, exploration and the exotic on writers such as Mary Shelley, Frances Burney, William Cowper, and Samuel Foote, and am currently completing a monograph, Islands of Celebrity: Oceania and the British Problem of Fame 1770-1830.