JENNIFER MILAM is the Pro Vice Chancellor (Academic Excellence) at the University of Newcastle in Callaghan, Australia. She has been head of the School of Culture and Communications and a professor of art history at the University of Melbourne, an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, director of the Sydney Intellectual History Network and a professor of art history and eighteenth-century studies at the University of Sydney. As an interdisciplinary scholar, her research interests include rococo art, patronage, curatorial studies, museum practice, intellectual history and garden design. Her books on rococo art include Historical Dictionary of Rococo Art, Fragonard’s Playful Paintings, and an edited collection Women, Art and the Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Europe. Her articles have appeared in The Art Bulletin, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Curator: The Museum Journal, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Art History and The Burlington Magazine. Milam’s current projects focus on issues of cosmopolitanism and national identity in garden design, and the cultural history of plants during the Enlightenment.
NICOLA PARSONS is a senior lecturer in English at the University of Sydney in Australia. Her research is focused on eighteenth-century literature and cultural history. She is especially interested in reading practices and forms of literary sociability. Her first book, Reading Gossip in Early Eighteenth-Century England, concentrates on texts by Delariver Manley, Daniel Defoe, Richard Steele, Edmund Curll and Jane Barker and shows how gossip modelled an interpretative strategy that shaped readers’ participation in both literary culture and in public debates. She has published articles on Delarivier Manley, Queen Anne’s correspondence with the Duchess of Marlborough, and Jane Barker.
