BA Cantab, MA York

Reader in Enlightenment, Gender and Court Studies


Room: Hel 364

Email: Clarissa.CampbellOrr@anglia.ac.uk

Telephone: 0845 196 2098
International: +44 1223 363271 ext 2098



Clarissa Campbell Orr's research activity

Clarissa Campbell Orr is Reader in Enlightenment, Gender and Court Studies at Anglia Ruskin University.

As an historian she is well known for her work on gender, enlightenment and court studies, especially the nature of queenship in 18th century Britain and Europe. She contributed the entry on Queen Charlotte to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and is working on a full-length study of her, which will emphasise her European context.

She teaches cultural, intellectual and political history from the early modern to the late Victorian period and has devised modules such as War Power and Culture: Europe 1660-1789, Family and Gender 1650-1850, The Enlightenment in France and England, and the level 3 Special Subject The 1790s in England: Radicalism, Conservatism and Feminism. She has a background in Literature and the History of Science and an MA in Women's Studies.

In 2004 she helped rehabilitate the reputation of George III by taking part in a BBC2 Timewatch documentary, 'How Mad Was George III?' and by contributing a paper to a conference sponsored by the Royal Collection, 'The Wisdom of George III', which related to the exhibition at The Queen's Gallery, 'George III and Queen Charlotte: Patronage, Collecting and Court Taste.'

She was a member of the 120 strong international Research Network "Feminism an Enlightenment: A Comparative History" funded from 1998-2001 by the Leverhulme Trust, Royal Holloway College, and the University of East London. She contributed two items to the book resulting from this project, Women, Gender and Enlightenment, ed. Barbara Taylor and Sarah Knott, Palgrave, 2005, paperback 2007. She also collaborated with British, German and North American scholars in a colloquium in 2004 on The Hanoverian Dimension to British History 1714-1837, co-funded by the German Historical Institute, London, and Cambridge University Centre for International Studies. The book resulting from this, edited by T Riotte and B Simms, including her chapter on 'Dynastic Perspectives' was published by Cambridge University Press in February 2007.

In October and November of 2011-12 she was the Andrew W. Mellon Senior Visiting Scholar at the Yale Centre for British Art in new Haven, USA. The visit coincided with the opening on October 26 of an exhibition, Johann Zoffany: Society Observed. She contributed a catalogue essay and some catalogue entries to this show, which also came to the Royal Academy in London in February 2012. The exhibition catalogue was short-listed for the 2011 William M T Berger prize for the best book on British Art.

Whilst at Yale she worked on two main projects, a study of Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, provisionally entitled A Consort and her Worlds: Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Queen of Gt. Britain and Electress of Hanover, and a biography of Mary Granville Delany, 1700-1788, for Yale University Press. This followed the successful 2009-10 exhibition on Mrs Delany at YCBA, and the Soane Museum, London.

Clarissa is part of a new research network on the Bluestockings and in 2012 Cambridge University Press will publish 'The Queen of the Blues, the Bluestocking Queen, and Bluestocking masculinity' in Elizabeth Eger, ed., Bluestockings Displayed: Portraiture, Performance and Patronage, 1730-1830. In April 2012, she spoke at the Bluestocking Symposium at the Huntington Library, Pasadena, California.

In December 2011 she succeeded Simon Thurley CBE as President of The Society for Court Studies and will be contributing a paper in June to the conference at Kensington Palace on 'The Making of a Modern Monarchy'. Her most recent publications are An Enlightenment Statesman in Whig Britain: Lord Shelburne in Context, 1737-1805, a book of essays co-edited with Nigel Aston, Boydell Press, 2011, and two essay reviews: 'The Power of the Protestant Patriarch and the Lure of the Court of St. James' in Eighteenth Century Ireland 26 (2012) pp. 170-178 and 'Popular History, Court Studies, and Courtier Diaries' in The Court Historian 17:1, June 2012, pp. 1-16.

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