Birth of the Modern - Britain in the Age of Jane Austen & JMW Turner

The year marking the 250th anniversaries of two of Britain’s most significant cultural figures presents an irresistible opportunity to examine one of the most dynamic and defining periods in British history. The combined lifespan of Jane Austen (d.1817) and J.M.W. Turner, stretching from 1775 to 1851, saw Britain transform from a broadly agrarian to a thriving industrial economy. Until 1815, war was an almost constant feature, having an impact both domestically and on Britain’s global standing. Bolstering the machinations of empire and trade were exciting technological and scientific innovations. All these developments were reflected politically and socially, sometimes in radical ways; they were also expressed in vibrant artistic and literary responses, not least by our two main protagonists. The 12 talks we present here, from leading historians of the 18th and 19th centuries, explore an age of fascinating – often interlinking – themes and personalities. 

We return to the beautiful and historic city of York for this symposium. Our venue is the wood-panelled Grand Boardroom of the former offices of the North Eastern Railway, now a five-star hotel – The Grand, York, where participants also stay and dine on both evenings. 

Full programme to be confirmed.

The Speakers

Simon Bradley
Joint editor of the Pevsner Architectural Guides, to which he has contributed a number of notable revised volumes. Simon studied at Oxford and the Courtauld Institute of Art, where his PhD explored the early 19th-century Gothic Revival. On the railway side, his books include the bestselling St Pancras Station (2010), The Railways: Nation, Network and People (2015), and Bradley’s Railway Guide: a journey through two centuries of Britain’s railway history, 1825-2025.

Steven Brindle
Born in Blackburn, Lancashire, Steven read History at Oxford and subsequently completed a doctorate on the architecture of late-medieval Spain. He has worked for English Heritage since 1989. As Inspector in the Crown Buildings team, he was closely involved in the post-fire restoration of Windsor Castle. Since 2008 he has been a Senior Properties Historian in the Curatorial Department. His publications include Brunel, the Man who Built the World (2005), and Windsor Castle, a Thousand Years of a Royal Palace (2018, as editor). His latest book, Architecture in Britain and Ireland, 1530–1830, was published by the Paul Mellon Centre in 2023. 

Dr Louise Curran
Associate Professor in Eighteenth-Century Literature at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Samuel Richardson and the Art of Letter-Writing (CUP, 2016) and has co-edited volume 9 of The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Samuel Richardson (CUP, 2024). She is part of the editorial team for the Oxford Edition of the Writings of Alexander Pope and is currently writing (supported by a Leverhulme Fellowship) a book on The Making of Letters as Literature: 1737-1824, which traces the influence of the publication of Pope’s letters from his lifetime authorised editions to the death of Byron.

Professor John Coffey
Director of the Wilberforce Diaries Project and the general editor (in preparation with Oxford University Press). Wilberforce’s diaries and religious journals were written between 1779 and 1833, they amount to almost a million words and form a remarkable record of the later Hanoverian age. As Professor of History at the University of Leicester, John has published extensively on the relationship between religion, politics and ideas in early modern and nineteenth-century Britain and America. Dr 

Patricia Fara
Emeritus Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, where she was Senior Tutor for ten years. She is a former President of the British Society for the History of Science and her prize-winning book, Science: A Four Thousand Year History (OUP), has been translated into nine languages. She has published widely and contributes to journals including History Today, BBC History, New Scientist, Nature and the Times Literary Supplement. Broadcasts include BBC Radio 4’s In our Time. 

Dr John McAleer
Associate Professor of History at the University of Southampton. John’s work explores the British encounter and engagement with the wider world in the 18th and 19th centuries, situating the history of empire in its global and maritime contexts. He was previously Curator of Imperial and Maritime History at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Margarette Lincoln
Curator Emerita at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, where she was Deputy Director until 2015. Margarette has held research posts at Goldsmiths, University of London, and at the University of Portsmouth, and gives regular talks and podcasts. Her latest book: Perfection: 400 Years of Women’s Quest for Beauty was published by Yale in 2024. Other books include  London and the Seventeenth Century: The Making of the World’s Greatest City  (2021) and Trading in War, which was shortlisted for the Wolfson Prize in 2019.

Nicola Moorby
Curator, British Art 1790-1850 at Tate and specialist in British art of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Her early career was spent at Tate (2000-2011), where she variously worked as an assistant curator, cataloguer and as registrar and manager of the Prints and Drawings Rooms. As an independent art historian (2011-2024) she was an accredited lecturer for the Arts Society and a regular teacher at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She has curated exhibitions for Hampshire Cultural Trust (‘Turner and the Sun’, 2017, and ‘Constable: The Dark Side’, 2023), and Turner’s House (‘Turner’s Kingdom: Beauty, Birds and Beasts’, 2025). Her book, Turner and Constable: Art, Life, Landscape is published by Yale University Press (2025).