Mary Chadwick

Postdoctoral Research Assistant, The Anne Clifford Project, University of Huddersfield

I’m working as postdoctoral Research Assistant on The Anne Clifford Project at the University of Huddersfield. The job involves transcribing, analysing and editing letters and accounts written by, to and for Lady Anne Clifford (1590-1676), alongside teaching and developing my research profile.

It seems like a bit of a jump from my PhD, which focused on the intersections between the manuscript and print cultures, and the national and gendered identities, of the eighteenth-century Welsh gentry. My immediate postdoctoral work at Aberystwyth, on The Mostyn Project, took me back to the seventeenth century as I worked on the history of the Mostyn family library c. 1670-1690. But the skills I gained from my time at Aberystwyth were very transferable. Spending a lot of time at the National Library of Wales, which is right on Aberystwyth University’s doorstep, I worked with manuscript and archival materials from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries gaining palaeographical and analytical skills. Hugh Owen Library on campus is very well stocked with books and journals. During and after my PhD I taught at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. I was encouraged to carry out public engagement activities, collaborate with colleagues across departments and institutions, apply for funding and fellowships, go to conferences and publish my research. During my PhD I published two pieces, one based on my MA dissertation and the other on the first chapter of my thesis.

My monograph will shortly be contracted to University of Wales Press, I’ll publish a co-authored piece on the Mostyn library, and an article on Mary Wollstonecraft’s influence on Romantic fiction set in Wales will appear in the open access journal Romantic Textualities.