Molly Corlett (UK)

Molly Corlett
MSt in British and European History

My MSt research used legal records to analyse the place of poorer people in seventeenth-century London neighbourhoods: I was interested in the relationship between moral and economic understandings of worth, and how negative attitudes to poverty figured in day-to-day local life. I greatly benefited from the chance to discuss this topic with other scholars from across the humanities, helping me to reconsider themes and questions which I had previously conceptualised in a narrower, disciplinarily bounded way. More broadly, my time in the Ertegun House prompted me to think about the implications of scholarship in a range of fields - from philosophy to music - for not only my academic research, but also my understanding of the world around me.

In addition to my MSt, I also worked on a side project about eighteenth-century black servants in my time as an Ertegun Scholar. I was luckily able to discuss this, too, with other scholars, and to practise a conference paper relating to my research with the Ertegun director. A chapter based on this work will be published in an edited volume, Black British History: New Perspectives from Roman Times to the Present Day, which is due to come out in 2019.

 

Life After Ertegun House

I started a PhD at King's College, London after leaving Ertegun House, working on a thesis which is provisionally titled 'Storytelling and social relations in north-east England, 1721-1815'. I am looking at similar sources to my MSt thesis - witness testimony and letters to a philanthropic landlord - and using them to analyse, again, the moral norms which underlay economic relationships. The eighteenth century was a time of transition, especially in the industrialising North East, and the stories told by witnesses and letter-writers speak to this process of transformative social and economic change.