Bailey, Natasha

University of Oxford, United Kingdom

Studies

BA in History, University of Oxford (2014-17); MSc in History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, University of Oxford (2017-18); DPhil in History, University of Oxford (2018-22)

Scientific Employment or Activities:

Postdoctoral Scholar - Universität Erfurt

Tutorial Assistant - New College, University of Oxford

Important scientific functions and memberships:

Oxford Centre for Intellectual History - Founding Committee Member

Duration of the scholarship

1 August – 31 August 2023

Early Career Scholars in the Anglo-German Enlightenment, 1700-1780

Early Career Scholars in the Anglo-German Enlightenment investigates the aspirations and career-forging activities of ‘early career scholars’ in Oxford, Cambridge, Halle, and Göttingen from c. 1700 to 1780 using a plethora of unstudied letters, commonplace books, and student theses. It applies both comparative and contextualist methods to grapple with four core areas: student expectations and outcomes; the theological vocation and fortification of the sacred; the ideal and reality of academic freedom; and the universities’ role in the burgeoning public sphere. By exploring how students, professors, and academic bureaucrats responded to an expanding print market, rising levels of education, and the emergence of job opportunities outside of the traditional professions (including in journalism, finance, and the empire), my study hopes to offer a fresh perspective on the universities’ place within the Enlightenment knowledge economy. Rather than being shackled by a clerically-orientated model of learning (as Oxford and Cambridge are thought to have been) or, conversely, promoting the novel at the expense of the traditional (as is often said of Göttingen), all four universities, I suggest, adapted distinctively to emerging scientific, economic, and moral pressures while helping to preserve a knowledge system in which theologians could thrive.

Standalone writings

Bailey, N., ‘The Fate of the Soul in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Oxford: An Undergraduate’s Conjectures’, History of Universities XXXVI/2 (forthcoming, 2023)

Bailey, N., ‘Academic Collaboration in the Early Enlightenment: Daniel Waterland (1683–1740) and his Cambridge Tyros’, English Historical Review (forthcoming, 2023)

Bailey, N., ‘The Newtonians’, in Oxford’s Savilian Professors of Astronomy: The First 400 Years, ed. S. Balbus and R. Wilson (forthcoming, 2024)

Articles in magazines and anthologies

Bailey, N., ‘Pedagogy from the Pulpit: John Mill’s Chapel Lectures and their Historical Setting, St Edmund Hall Magazine (November 2022), 136-140