Popular Classics, 2026-2030
I am Principal Investigator on ‘Popular Classics: Prose Fiction in Eighteenth-Century Britain and the Formation of a Canon’, a project funded by an Opus 29 grant awarded by the National Science Centre, Poland (project number 2025/57/B/HS2/01436), and hosted by Kazimierz Wielki University, Bydgoszcz, with Professor Jakub Lipski as Co-Investigator. This project, ranked third in its category, investigates how the novel, a relatively new genre in this period and subject to critical scrutiny, contributed towards the formation of a national library of modern classic literature in Britain.
Networks of Reception in Eighteenth-Century Newspapers and Magazines, 2022-2024
From October 2022 to September 2024 I held a Polonez Biz MSCA Fellowship as Principal Investigator on ‘Networks of Reception in Eighteenth-Century Newspapers and Magazines: Laurence Sterne’. The project was co-funded by the European Commission and the Polish National Science Centre (NCN) with a Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFUND grant. Our bid for this competitive research grant was ranked first in its category (project number 2021/43/P/HS2/01182).
The project was hosted by Kazimierz Wielki University (Bydgoszcz, Poland); Professor Jakub Lipski was the project’s Mentor and collaborator, who produced several research outputs. The main output was my short monograph, Networks of Reception in the Eighteenth-Century British Press and Laurence Sterne, published in the Cambridge Elements in Eighteenth-Century Connections series (Cambridge University Press, 2025).
More details of activities and outputs can be found on the project website.
The Eighteenth-Century British Novel and the Arts, 2021-2025
I was a Co-Investigator on ‘The Eighteenth-Century British Novel and the Arts’. This multidisciplinary project was funded by an Opus grant from the Polish government-funded National Science Centre (project number 2020/37/B/HS2/02093). It involved a collaboration between Kazimierz Wielki University (Bydgoszcz) and Poznań University.
This three-year project ran from January 2021 to January 2025. Project activities included journal articles, conferences, and an online exhibition of illustrations of Tobias Smollett’s work coinciding with the 300-year anniversary of his birth in 2021. The multi-author Edinburgh Companion to the Eighteenth-Century British Novel and the Arts volume, co-edited by Jakub Lipski and Mary Newbould, was the project’s major output, published in 2024 by Edinburgh University Press.
Find out more on the project website.
Sterne Digital Library, 2019-2021
I collaborated with Helen Williams (PI) as a Co-Investigator on ‘Sterne Digital Library‘, an AHRC-funded Digital Humanities project run collaboratively between Cambridge and Northumbria universities, Cambridge University Library, and the Laurence Sterne Trust from 2019-21.
The project’s major output is Laurence Sterne and Sterneana, an Open Access dataset of first editions of Laurence Sterne’s works, and key examples of Sterneana. I co-edited its multiple entries from an international array of contributions with Helen Williams. This Open Access resource is freely available to all users.
Mary Newbould 