Staff Profiles

Modules taught

Undergraduate

• Renaissance Literature Core modul
• Special Subject: The State of Utopia; British and French Orientalism
• World Literatures
• Crime, Culture and Transgression

Postgraduate

• MA English Studies
• MRes As part of a Master's level research programme, Nicole Pohl provides an exciting opportunity for students to pursue individual projects located within the interdisciplinary study of Utopian Studies.
• PhD Supervisions

 

 

Nicole Pohl works on eighteenth-century English literature with a particular interest in women's letters and literature, European Enlightenment and European literary networks. Her other research area is utopias and utopianism.

Nicole Pohl has published and edited books on women's utopian writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, European salons and epistolarity. Nicole Pohl is welcoming MA/MRes/PhD projects that concern any aspect of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature, utopias and utopianism.

She was on the Management Committee of COST Action IS0901: Women’s Writing in History, financed by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology).The COST Action developed a large scale research project to lay the groundwork for a new history of European women’s participation in the literary field of the centuries before 1900. See:http://www.womenwriters.nl/index.php/Project_news

Nicole is the General Editor of the interdisciplinary and peer-reviewed journal Utopian Studies. For enquiries, please contact her on: npohl.utopia@googlemail.com

  @ UtopiaSJournal

For a sample issue, please see: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/utopianstudies.24.2.issue-2

 She is on the Steering Committee of the AHRC-funded Elizabeth Montagu and the Bluestocking Circle  Project, http://www.elizabethmontaguletters.co.uk/home.

Nicole is also a co-convenor of "Restoration to Reform" which is the English Faculty seminar for eighteenth-century studies at the Oxford University. "Restoration to Reform" meets fortnightly to hear papers by visiting academics from a range of faculties and disciplines. Since the first meeting in 1986, the character of the seminar has been scholarly, interdisciplinary and convivial. For further information see:http://restorationtoreform.blogspot.com/

Books

• Pohl, N, Ed., "The Commerce of Life": Elizabeth Montagu (1718-1800), Huntington Library Quarterly (2018)
  eISSN: 1544-399X
  Website 
• Pohl N, Ed., The Letters of Sarah Scott, Pickering & Chatto (2013)
  ISBN: 9781848934689
  Abstract Sarah Robinson Scott was a writer, translator and social reformer. While Scott's legacy presents her as a committed Anglican philanthropist, the letters she wrote reveal her to have been a witty, even savage, commentator on eighteenth-century life.This is the first edition of Scott's letters to be published and presents all extant copies.

Journal articles

• Pohl N, '"Knitting needles, knotting shuttles, & Totums & Cards & Counters": The Bluestockings and the material culture of fibre arts'
  Textile History 50 (2) (2019) pp.143-162
  ISSN: 0040-4969 eISSN: 1743-2952
  Abstract

  In this paper I want to tease out threads in the socio-economic narrative of fibre arts by using the case study of the Bluestocking Circle, in particular Elizabeth Montagu (1718–1800), Mary Delany (1700–1788) and Montagu’s sister, Sarah Scott (1721–1795). To contrast these lives through the lens of material culture, we can identify needlework and textiles as a subtle marker of social mobility and disparities in wealth within one social circle (the Bluestockings) and family. Whilst Mary Delany combined scientific interest with technical skills, Elizabeth Montagu commissioned decorative fibre arts, such as her famous feather work, for public display, and her sister Sarah Scott, forced by diminished social and economic circumstances, concentrated on practical dress-making and alteration and appliqué. Both sisters, though born into the same family, thus developed very different textile skill sets. The production of textiles carried class markers in terms of what kind of work was produced and what kind of materials and techniques were used. Thus, fibre arts, like fashion, were ‘an emblem of material self-advancement, [and] … a badge of moral worth’ (John Styles, The Dress of the People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 60).
  

  Website 
• Pohl N, '“The sense of an ending”: Utopia in the Anthropocene'
  Књижевна историја = Književna istorija 51 (167) (2019) pp.64-82
  ISSN: 0350-6428
  Abstract

  Ulrich Beck, in his article, “Climate for Change” of 2010, suggested that in the face of “climate breakdown” (George Monbiot), “something historically new can emerge, namely a cosmopolitan vision in which people see themselves … as part of an endangered world …”. This paper will reflect on the possibility and impossibility of utopianism in the Anthropocene and ask the question if utopia is possible in the Anthropocene? It will take into consideration recent debates around utopia and the Anthropocene and look at four literary examples from Germany, Norway, England and the US.
  

  Website 
• Pohl N, '"The Commerce of Life": Elizabeth Montagu (1718-1800)'
  Huntington Library Quarterly 81 (4) (2019) pp.443-463
  ISSN: 0018-7895 eISSN: 1544-399X
  Website 
• Pohl N, '«Eine rezensentin zweier literarischer Nationen» : Mme de Staël, August Karl Böttiger and Henry Crabb Robinson in Weimar'
  Cahiers staëliens (2018)
  ISSN: 0575-1276
  
• Pohl N, '"The World begins in Man": A Brief and Selected History of Translations of Utopia into German'
  Utopian Studies 27 (3) (2016) pp.493-504
  ISSN: 1045-991X eISSN: 2154-9648
  Website 
• Pohl N, 'Of Balloons and Foreign Worlds: Mary Hamilton and the Eighteenth-Century Imaginary Voyage'
  Azimuth. Philosophical Coordinates in Modern and Contemporary Age 3 (1) (2014) pp.61-77
  ISSN: 2282-4863
  Website 
• Pohl N, 'The plausible selves of Sarah Scott (1721-95)'
  Eighteenth-Century Life 35 (1) (2011) pp.133-148
  ISSN: 0098-2601
  Website 
• Pohl N, '“Perfect Reciprocity”: Salon Culture and Epistolary Conversations'
  Women's Writing 13 (1) (2006) pp.139-159
  ISSN: 0969-9082 eISSN: 1747-5848
  Abstract

  In this essay the author traces the development of polite sociability within the framework of the European salon. In particular, the author suggests an epistolary intertextuality within this salon culture that reveals a politicization of sociability from the salons of the précieuses to the early nineteenth-century salons in France and Germany. Underlying this fusion of art, conversation and epistolarity is a greater vision of civil society. What interests the author particularly is the notion of reciprocal communication and sociability that is developed in the tradition of the letter in the work of the Bluestockings Bettina von Arnim and Rahel Varnhagen. Not wishing to ignore the problematic questions of periodization and cultural differences, the European salons of the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries clearly shared a common concern: to find their place in an ever-changing public sphere.
  

  Website 

Book chapters

• Pohl N, '"To Embroider what is Wanting": Making, Consuming and Mending Textiles in the Lives of the Bluestockings' in Chloe Wigston-Smith and Serena Dyer (ed.), Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain: A Nation of Makers, Bloomsbury (2020)
  ISBN: 9781501349614
  Website 
• Pohl N, 'The deliverance of evil: Utopia and evil' in Douglas Hedley, Chad Meister, Charles Taliaferro (ed.), The History of Evil in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, 1700–1900, Routledge (2018)
  ISBN: 9781138236837
  Website 
• Pohl N, Franklin C, '"An Editor’s duty is indeed that of most danger": the rationale for a digital edition of Elizabeth Montagu’s letters' in Amy Culley, Anna M. Fitzer (ed.), Editing Women's Writing, 1670–1840, Routledge (2017)
  ISBN: 9781848935914 eISBN: 9781315100418
  Abstract
  Website 
• Pohl N, 'Introduction to: The Story of Utopias / by Lewis Mumford.' in , Berkshire Publishing (2016)
  eISBN: 9781614728856
  
• Pohl N, 'Cosmopolitan Bluestockings' in Deborah Heller (ed.), Bluestockings Now!: The Evolution of a Social Role, Ashgate (2015)
  ISBN: 9781409434665 eISBN: 9781315569581
  Abstract It is hardly possible to call to mind the cultural and intellectual life and letters in eighteenth-century Europe without referring to the special role played by the salon in forging an egalitarian intellectual culture that cut across divisions of rank, gender, and nations. Current debates about literary salons and the Republic of Letters have expanded and challenged this interpretation of salon culture in many ways and according to the complexities of the “interface between court society, elite networks, and the literary sphere.”2 While critical work on the salons underscores their pan-European, transnational element, more careful work needs to be done on how issues of national identity, regionalism, patriotism, dynasticism, class, and rank entered the salon space. Indeed, here I agree with Clarissa Campbell Orr’s work, that despite the Habermasian dictum of the bourgeois public sphere, social networks such as the Bluestockings were linked by a complex transnational interconnectedness based on dynastic marriage, patronage alliances, and kinship ties. Their relationship to the Court defined their understanding of national identity and patriotism. In the following chapter, I would like to explore these issues in more detail by focusing on the Bluestockings and their transnational networks.3 I will be drawing on correspondences and travel diaries by Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Vesey, Lady Anna Miller, Sarah Scott, Sophie von La Roche, and Mme du Deffand to think about the particularities of polite patriotism, cosmopolitan aspirations, and cultural transfer in eighteenthcentury English salon culture.Website 
• Pohl N, Schellenberg B, 'Sarah Scott, Elizabeth Montagu, and the Familiar Letter in Dialogue' in Temma Berg and Sonia Kane (ed.), Women, Gender, and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Essays in Memory of Betty Rizzo, Lehigh University Press (2013)
  ISBN: 9781611461411 eISBN: 9781611461428
  
• Pohl N, 'European networks: Dorothea von Kurland's salons' in Readers, writers, salonnieres: female networks in Europe, 1700-1900, Peter Lang (2011)
  ISBN: 9783039119721
  

Reviews

• Pohl N, review of Bluestocking Feminism and British-German Cultural Transfer, 1750-1837, in The German Quarterly 90 (3) (2017) pp.378-380ISSN: 0016-8831
  Website 
• Pohl N, review of Lives and Letters, in Eighteenth-century Studies 45 (2012) pp.309-312ISSN: 0013-2586 eISSN: 1086-315X
  
• Pohl N, review of Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community 1762 to 1830, in Eighteenth-century Studies 46 (2012) pp.167-169ISSN: 0013-2586 eISSN: 1086-315X
  Website 

Other publications

• Pohl N, '“In der freisten Luft” (Goethe). Offenbach under the Reign of Wolfgang Ernst II Fürst von Isenburg'
  Goethezeitportal (2018) Abstract http://www.goethezeitportal.de/home.htmlWebsite 
• Pohl N, 'The Letters of Sarah Scott: All letters are newly transcribed and edited, and the edition is published in collaboration with the Huntington Library and approved by the MLA'
  (2013) ISBN: 9781848934689
  

Membership of professional bodies

 

• Modern Language Association
• British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies
• American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies
• Society for Utopian Studies

 

Conferences

 

Conferences organised

International

• Writing Materials: Women of Letters from Enlightenment to Modernity. King’s College, London and The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2012
• Voices in Dialogue: Ideational Production and Reception of Women’s Writing in Europe, Chawton House/University of Southampton, 2011
• Utopian Studies Conference, New Lanark, 2005

National

• Women’s Literary Networks, 1580-present, University of London, 2009
• British Female Communities, 1640-1810, University of London, 1995

Invited keynote conference presentations/lectures 

• 'An Editor's Duty is indeed that of most Danger' , Future of Editing Seminar, University of Oxford, 2014   ( http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/notices/2014/nov-05)

Comment: http://austgate.co.uk/2014/11/future-of-editing-some-reflections-on-nicole-pohl-on-sarah-scott/

• ‘Eighteenth-Century Women’s Writing’, University of Basel, 2013
• Graduate Workshop for Manuscripts and Women’s Writing, University of Madrid, 2012
• ‘Craftivism: Craft + Activism=Utopia?’ Spectres of Utopia, University of Lublin, Poland, 2010
• ‘Nostalgia, Utopia and the Country House’, Bridges to Utopia, University of Limerick, 2009

Selected conference presentations since 2003

• 'The Dilemma of Evil in Utopia', Utopian Studies Conference, Charles University, Prague.
• ‘Collective Roots: Homesteading and Political Protest’, Utopian Studies Conference, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, 2012. 
• ‘Living Backwards: Time and Hope in Werner Koch’s See-Leben Trilogy’, Utopia, Crisis and Justice, University of Cyprus, 2011.  
• ‘The Plausible Selves of Sarah Scott’, Editing the Eighteenth Century, University of Glasgow, 2009. 
• ‘Relative Values: Household and Community in Sarah Scott’s Work, BSECS, University of Oxford, 2009.
• ‘The Paradox of the Voyage Utopia’, New Worlds Reflected: Representations of Utopia, the New World and other Worlds (1500-1800), University of London, 2009
• ‘Editing Eighteenth-Century Letters’, "'I Remain, &c.': Addressing the Eighteenth-Century Letter," University of Oxford, 2008
• ‘“Perfect Reciprocity”: Salon Culture and Epistolary Conversations’, Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of York, 2005
• ‘An Emblem of Themselves’: The Country House as Utopia’,Women and the British Country House 1650-1900 Conference, University of  York, 2004
• ‘Architecture and Utopia: Lady Mary Hamilton’s Munster Village’, Enlightenment Utopias ,Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of York, 2003
• ‘Wunsch-Räume, Schreib-Räume: Die querelle des femmes and Utopia’, Querelle des femmes Conference, University of Frankfurt, 2003

 

Press, publicity and reviews

 

• Interview with ABC, Future Tense: Utopia’s Second coming, September 2012 (podcast: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/futuretense/utopia27s-second-coming/4267534)
• BBC Radio 4, In Our Time, on the Bluestockings.  http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b045c0h9.
•  BBc Radio 4, In Our Time, on Fanny Burney.           http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/iot
•  Public Debate with David Bramwell, Blackwell's Oxford, 18.9.2014, No 9 Bus to Utopia Tour 
• The Chearful Companion: An evening of culture by candlelight in the eighteenth-century home. This interactive event between Oxford Brooks English and Modern Language Department and the AHRC-funded Digital Miscellanies Index Project at the University of Oxford (digitalmiscellaniesindex.org), supported by the early music duo Alva (Vivien Ellis and Gilles Lewin; http://digitalmiscellaniesindex.org/performances/)