Megan Beech, Newnham College, Cambridge
Megan is a PhD researcher working on Dickens’s reading tours in the nineteenth century. This research relates to ideas of entertainment as a vehicle for happiness and the role of performance in social well-being. She has also published on pleasure and the Hogarth press and the role of female sexuality in modernist poetry. Megan is also an award-winning performance poet who has performed at venues ranging from the Houses of Parliament to Glastonbury Festival. She has two books, When I Grow Up I want to be Mary Beard and You Sad Feminist. The second of these is based on her experiences of depression and the relationships between mental illness, performance, and happiness.
Eliza Haughton-Shaw, King’s College, Cambridge
Eliza is working towards a PhD on the topic of eccentricity and eccentrics in writing by Sterne, Wordsworth, Dickens and Edward Lear. Her thesis takes as its starting point the questions evoked by eccentric character, drawing on a range of theoretical sources — from David Hume to the psycho-analyst D.W. Winnicott — working on comparable problems around failed or functionally imperfect sympathy with others. The questions raised by her research coincide with questions about happiness and personal flourishing. In particular, she seeks to revise the relatively unchallenged assignment of unfelt or unredeemed feelings to the domain of trauma theory, suggesting that there might be other ways to value such feelings without a further effort to recover them.
Alex Hobday, King’s College, Cambridge
Alex is a PhD student in the department of Eighteenth-Century and Romantic studies. His research focuses on happiness in the works of Boswell, Sterne, Wollstonecraft and Wordsworth. A particular interest of this project is the notion that individuals are most happy in moments of intense perceptual awareness.
Happiness: Enlightenment to Present 