Chloe Wigston Smith

Profile

Biography

Chloe Wigston Smith joined the department in 2016 as a specialist in eighteenth-century literature and culture and is a member of the department’s Eighteenth Century and Romantic Research School and York’s interdisciplinary Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies. Her research interests include material culture studies, the history of the novel, and the global eighteenth century, and her multidisciplinary scholarship draws on her joint postgraduate training in literary studies and the history of dress.

Chloe’s most recent book, Novels, Needleworks, and Empire: Material Entanglements in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World , was published in the  The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History by Yale University Press (2024). She is the author of Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel, published by Cambridge University Press (2013), and co-editor of two collections: Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain: A Nation of Makers (Bloomsbury, 2020) and Small Things in the Eighteenth Century: The Political and Personal Value of the Miniature (Cambridge, 2022). She has also published articles and chapters in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Eighteenth-Century Life, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, and several essay collections. She has contributed to a number of advisory boards for journals and book series.

Chloe’s commitment to the interdisciplinary eighteenth century underpins her enthusiasm for collaborating with museum and heritage partners on exhibitions and schools programmes. She was co-curator of the exhibition, Austen & Turner: A Country House Encounter, at Harewood House (2025), and has collaborated with the National Trust and several sites in Yorkshire.

Chloe was previously Associate Professor of English at the University of Georgia, where she was the recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Outstanding Assistant Professor in the Arts and Humanities. Her research has been supported by the British Academy, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington Library, the Lewis Walpole Library, and the Yale Center for British Art, among other funders. She is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Research

Overview

Chloe Wigston Smith's research sits at the intersection of literary history and material culture studies, with a particular emphasis on writing about and by women. Her 2013 monograph (paperback 2016) Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge University Press), was shortlisted for the Millia Davenport Publication Award by the Costume Society of America. It studies clothes, accessories, narrative textiles, as well as a host of other material objects. It also explores a broad range of authors, including Jane Barker, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, John Cleland, Frances Burney, and Mary Robinson.

Chloe’s most recent monograph Novels, Needleworks, and Empire: Material Entanglements in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World , was published in the  The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History by Yale University Press (2024) and supported by fellowships from the British Academy and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. It was a finalist for the Kenshur book prize and the Susanne M. Glassock book prize. The book follows the material and visual images of the Atlantic world that found their way into the hands of women and girls in Britain and early America—in the objects they made, the books they held, the stories they read—and in doing so adjusted and altered the form and content of print and material culture. Together, fiction and handicrafts offer new evidence of women’s material contributions to the home’s place within the global eighteenth century, revealing the rich and complex connections between the global and the domestic.

Chloe’s co-edited collection, with historian Dr Serena Dyer, Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain: A Nation of Makers, looks anew at the maker’s knowledge and haptic skills that women, men, and children shared in Georgian Britain. Her chapter examines the cultural and economic values of women’s handiwork in Hannah Robertson's Young Ladies School of Arts; Robertson spent several years living and teaching in York. Her co-edited collection with Beth Fowkes Tobin, Small Things in the Eighteenth Century: The Political and Personal Value of the Miniature (Cambridge, 2022), offers an intimate history of how small things were used, handled, and worn. Small things, from tiny books to ceramic trinkets and toothpick cases, could delight and entertain, generating tactile pleasures for users while at the same time signalling the limits of the body's adeptness or the hand's dexterity. From the decorative and playful to the useful and performative, small things as tea caddies, wampum beads, and drawings of ants negotiated larger political, cultural, and scientific shifts as they transported aesthetic and cultural practices across borders, via nationalist imagery, gift exchange, and the movement of global goods.

Chloe has published articles and essays on a variety of topics, including needlework, servant dress, travel literature, theatrical portraiture, trade cards, it-narratives and including on the representation of small things in poetry and culture, and small trade in Frances Burney’s fiction. Her article 'Dressing the British' on costume books, visual culture, and nationalism was awarded the Percy G. Adams Article Prize for the best essay in eighteenth-century studies by the Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Her research has received funding from the British Academy, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the Yale Center for British Art, the Huntington Library, the Folger Institute, the Lewis Walpole Library and the National Endowment for the Humanities in the US. In the UK, she has given invited talks at QMUL, Oxford, and Warwick. She has contributed to a number of editorial boards for journals and special series for academic presses.

Supervision

Chloe has supervised and co-supervised several PhDs, including two Collaborative Doctoral Awards with the National Trust, on a range of topics in eighteenth-century studies, including material culture, fashion culture, the domestic interior, and women’s writing in eighteenth-century print and visual culture. She has also co-supervised and served as a Thesis Advisory Panel member for postgraduate researchers in History of Art. 

She welcomes enquiries from postgraduate researchers interested in eighteenth-century studies, the history of the novel, women’s writing, visual and material culture, the global eighteenth century and transatlantic print culture. She brings her experience as Graduate Chair for the department, from 2020-2023, to supervision, as well as her current position as Director of the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies.

External activities

Overview

Since joining York, Chloe Wigston Smith has been involved in a number of external activities, drawing on her interdisciplinary research. Most recently, she co-curated the exhibition Austen & Turner: A Country House Encounter at Harewood House (2025). She has also collaborated with museums and heritage sites, including the V & A Museum, Fairfax House, Mansion House, and Beningbrough (National Trust), on immersive activities and exhibitions.

Chloe is committed to interdisciplinary, research-led resources for young people. In York, she created the educational programme The Story of Things in partnership with Fairfax House. It teaches children how to write modern day versions of 18th century object narratives. She has also helped to develop educational resources and education packs for Mansion House and the Georgian Theatre Royal in Richmond, and Harewood House Trust. She has led immersive learning experiences on 18th century salon culture at Richmond's Georgian Festival and York's Mansion House.

Chloe has written short pieces for The Conversation UK and contributed a piece on Frances Burney to the British Library's Discovering Literature: Restoration and 18th Century.

In 2019, she co-organized two conferences in collaboration with US partners: Small Things in the Eighteenth Century (funded by the British Academy) and Crusoe at 300: Adaptations, Afterlives & Futures. 

Teaching

Undergraduate

Chloe Wigston Smith regularly teaches modules across the curriculum, with special emphasis on the eighteenth century and Romantic literature. This includes first year and second year modules, including ‘Writing Modernity: Approaches to Literature I’ and ‘Inventing Britain 1700-1830’. Her third year option modules include ‘Fashion in the Eighteenth Century’ and more recently, ‘Crafting the Past: Reimagining the Eighteenth Century’, which focuses on experimental rewritings and recreations of eighteenth-century literature and culture. Her teaching is research-led and her approach centres feminist thinking, decolonial approaches to the eighteenth century, and interdisciplinary connections and contexts.

Postgraduate

Chloe convenes and contributes to the team-taught core modules for the MA in Eighteenth Century Studies and the MA in Literature of the Romantic Period. She regularly convenes and/or contributes to the MA module ‘Wollstonecraft to Austen: Femininity and Literary Culture’ and the ‘Global Eighteenth Century’. She also teaches her MA option module, ‘Fashion and Material Culture in Eighteenth-Century Literature’. Chloe regularly supervises postgraduate dissertations.