A Brief Introduction
Hi! My name is Hilary Gallito and I am a Visiting Graduate Scholar at Johns Hopkins University. I recently earned both my MA in History and BA in History and Classics at Hopkins, where I was also a varsity student-athlete on the track and field team. While my broader academic interests include classical reception, intellectual and religious history, and gendered history in the Atlantic World, I am also passionate about using tools in the digital humanities and public-facing scholarship to engage with contemporary political and cultural issues.
The work showcased on this website, The Catharine Macaulay Project, is made possible by funding from Johns Hopkins University’s Second Decade Society’s Meg Walsh Award, which is granted annually to one graduating senior to undertake an independent project of their own unique design involving international travel.
Since winning the award, I’ve packed my bags, boarded my flights, and moved across the pond to London. Primarily based at the British Library, I will spend this year traveling across the UK to different relevant archives, reading secondary literature on Macaulay and her inner circle, and exploring my new home.
Background
When I first went about applying for the Meg Walsh Award, I envisioned creating some digital humanities project that would build on my MA thesis, which, briefly, examined the life and writings of three eighteenth-century female writers in the Atlantic World to parse their understanding of classical antiquity and understand how the Classics informed their literary expression through the lens of the ancient past. Macaulay was one of the women I spotlighted but I felt there was still so much work to be done on her more generally.
While I had the opportunity to travel across archives in the United States to inform my initial thesis, I did not have the chance to travel to the UK, where Macaulay lived. Thus, this project serves as a continuation of my work and the opportunity to spend a year investigating Macaulay’s philosophies.
Who was Catharine Macaulay?
Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay Graham (1731-91) was widely acknowledged as England’s first major female historian and pamphleteer. Not just a historian but also writing in genres including education and religion, Macaulay’s life’s works are united by her championing of the natural rights and liberties of all human beings.
Macaulay boldly presented herself as an exceptional figure: as a voice of freedom in an age of corruption and colonial warfare, a Roman matron, and as a great national historian. Few shared openly her outright hostility to monarchy in all its forms and dared to fashion themselves as she did, as unapologetically republican with Marcus Junius Bruto as her hero. Her writing resonated with readers across the globe including English reformers, American colonists, and French revolutionaries, all of whom sought responsibility over their own political destinies.
Despite the international fame she found in her lifetime, Macaulay would fall into oblivion in the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century. Indeed, it was not until after the first generation of female historians in the academy that Macaulay began to slowly be recognized as a significant Enlightenment thinker. In spite of this revival of interest, Macaulay remains comparatively little known outside of specialist history and literary academic circles.
Project Outline
Thus, the Catharine Macaulay Project, much like other recent scholarship, looks to place Macaulay in the tradition of women’s intellectual development and parse the connections between herself, international circles of revolutionaries, and her self-embodiment as a Roman persona, fashionable salonniere, woman of learning, and astute commercial writer. I hope to answer the question(s): how did Macaulay’s philosophy connect her various writings, and how did she engage with both ideas of gender and classical republicanism?
To do this, and to promote historical learning and push actors like Macaulay back into the limelight, I intend to use the Meg Walsh Award to turn to practices in public-facing and accessible history to create an online resource that includes two components: (1) annotations of some of her publications and (2) a blog to document my research and exploration of Macaulay’s life and writings.
I hope you enjoy exploring my scholarly writing as well as reflections on what it has meant to move to England.
