The arrival of a new academic year means that my work on Macintosh will take something of a back seat for the next few months as I focus on teaching, assessment, and administration (the Holy Trinity of term time). I am, however, very much looking forward to presenting some of my work at the Queen Mary Eighteenth-Century Studies seminar series on 23 October 2018. I’ll be speaking to the title “The forgotten lives of William Macintosh in the Age of Revolution: from Caribbean planter to traveller in India; from spy in France to exile in Germany” (a slightly long-winded attempt to advertise Macintosh’s significance to a range of different audiences).
Looking further ahead, I have recently completed a fellowship application which—if successful—will allow me time to complete my programme of archival work and to begin writing my long-planned monograph, currently entitled The power of print: William Macintosh and the transnational circulation of radical ideas in the Age of Revolution. As with all grant applications, this is a long shot; all I can do between now and next spring is to keep my fingers crossed and hope that my numbers finally come up in the great cosmic grant lottery.
In the next few weeks I hope to receive reviewers’ comments on my paper reconstructing Macintosh’s private library (seized during the French Revolution and deposited, largely, in the Bibliothèque municipal d’Avignon). This has been a passion project within a passion project and I’m keen to see what the reviewers make of it.