"Sending your own eyes back at you and imploring you to desire and be desired, and in a fey way that they are sweetness and remembered and clasped.

Writing generated during Emma Mitchell's BSECS 2026 critical fabulation workshop, working from an enamelled pill-box. Full poem here.

I presented at the 55th annual conference of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the theme of which was ‘Big and Small’. The conference took place at Pembroke College, Oxford in January 2026.

My paper, ‘Little Makings: Mending Porcelain in the Eighteenth-Century Home’ argued that there was a much more fluid boundary between whole and broken ceramics in the early-eighteenth century than we might think. Using period manuals such as the 1704 Accomplish’d Female Instructor, I drew connections between early experiments in making porcelain and the cement ingredients homeowners and servants were using to mend broken objects. I think there is a sense in which these recipes are not mere adhesives, but attempts to create porcelain body in miniature, on a domestic scale.

I was joined in Oxford by fellow Cambridge historian Jake Bransgrove, who presented the paper ‘Science and Portrait Silhouettes at the Late-Georgian Court’.