Tessa Whitehouse

I’m from the North West of England and was educated at Catholic schools around the country, which made me aware of the social dynamics of religious identity and the importance of literature for community histories. I studied at Cambridge and here in London, where I also worked in publishing, before joining Queen Mary as a lecturer in September 2012. I direct the Queen Mary Centre for Religion and Literature in English.

I work on literature and religion in the period 1660-1830, focusing on material culture and textual circulation among coteries and across the public sphere. I’m particularly interested in letters: how they enact and reflect friendship and learning, how they were used to construct communities, and how transatlantic epistolary networks operated. I also investigate periodicals, lectures, conduct books, and ethical writings in the context of eighteenth-century manuscript culture.

Friendship in the Atlantic world, among children, and as a literary phenomenon is another project that I’ve been developing. I’ve co-convened a research network and worked with a creative technologies enterprise and a school to develop new methodologies for exploring children’s experiences of friendship in a project funded by Creativeworks London called ‘Making Friends’.

My first book, The Textual Culture of English Protestant Dissent, 1720-1800 (Oxford University Press, 2015) explores the sociable, collective character of dissenters' teaching and writing in the eighteenth century. Since then I have edited three interdisciplinary collections which investigate the creative, commercial and technical aspects of making books in the long eighteenth century; religion and life cycle processes in early modern England; and a special issue of the open access journal É-Rea which establishes a new framework for understanding religious experiences in historical contexts. I’ve held Visiting Research Fellowships at Chawton House Library, the American Philosophical Society, and the Academy of Finland Centre for Excellence in the History of Experiences where I’ve worked on spiritual autobiography, manuscript memorial practices, and female friends and their letters. I’m now leading the project ‘Mapping Multifaith London’ which aims to locate, for the first time, sites of significance for religious minorities in the capital during the eighteenth century. It’s an archival-digital project using a map of London from 1746 produced by the Huguenot cartographer John Roque.