15 August 2023

 

Roundtable:  Queenship  within  Narratives  of  Empire  and  Colonisation

Featuring Susannah Lyon-Whaley, Lauren Working, and Camilla de Koning

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Overview 

This roundtable discusses the roles of queenship in empire and colonialism, examining queens’ roles, the sources on which we base our knowledge of colonial involvement, and challenges posed to historians undertaking research in this area.

 

Chair

Johanna Strong

 

Seminar Timetable

17:00 – 17:10: Introduction (Chair)

17:10 – 18:00: Roundtable discussion

18:00 – 18:15: Q&A

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Presenter(s) bio

Susannah Lyon-Whaley has recently submitted her PhD in Art History on Catherine of Braganza and the culture of nature at the University of Auckland. She has published on Stuart queens and the spa, and is also the editor of a forthcoming volume on floral culture and the Tudor and Stuart courts. She is especially interested in the iconography of queens and empire, and with queens’ engagement with (natural) goods carried to England by burgeoning colonial and trade networks.

 

Lauren Working is Lecturer in Early Modern Studies at the University of York. Her research explores how English colonialism influenced taste and politics in seventeenth-century London. Her first book, The Making of an Imperial Polity, jointly won the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize in 2021. She has written articles on topics including civility and intoxication, female travellers, and the colonial gaze in a cavalier poem about Madagascar. She is a consultant for the National Portrait Gallery and a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker.

 

Camilla de Koning started her PhD research with HRP and the University of Manchester in October 2022. She moved from the Netherlands to the UK for this project and has previously done research on the Dutch Atlantic, kinship in slavery and colonial networks. Her research has started with Queen Anne, and her connection to the asiento de negroes, the slave trading contract with the Spanish the Queen acquired in 1713. Researching Queen Anne’s colonial connections means diving into court culture, royal patronage and tracing how Anne come into contact with colonial matters, people and commodities.