Dr Meghan Kobza
Historian of Leisure Culture, Costume, & Commercialization
About
Dr Meghan Kobza is a historian of leisure culture, costume, and commercialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her forthcoming book, Masquerade: Unmasking Georgian London, brings this vibrant cultural phenomenon to life through the varied and colourful experiences of people, places, and material objects that were crucial in establishing this historic entertainment within the elite Georgian social calendar and public imaginations of the past and present.
Meg currently holds a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Newcastle University where she completed her PhD in 2020. This postdoctoral project explores the interconnections between display, performance, and consumer culture and how making, selling, and/or wearing leisure costume impacted cultural perceptions of race and gender within the British Empire. This research will produce a second book that examines the role of amateur performance, play, and dress in enforcing and challenging racial hierarchies of the long nineteenth century.
As an extension of this work, Meg has collaborated with the National Trust to bring an accessible and experiential history of Georgian fancy dress to the Bath Assembly Rooms. This has inspired further collaboration with the National Trust and forthcoming experiential events with the British Academy that examine past and present relationships between fancy dress and fashion.
Meg has given a number of public talks at heritage sites, including Powderham Castle and the Bath Assembly Rooms, and has lectured at the Royal Academy. She has also taught at a range of higher education institutions during her international academic career. She currently teaches at Newcastle University (UK) and has taught at Arrupe College Loyola University Chicago, National Louis University, and Moraine Valley Community College (Illinois, USA). She is the domestic conference organiser for the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Current Projects
The Roots of Cultural Appropriation in Leisure Costume
My current project, funded through the Leverhulme Trust, examines issues of race, empire, and otherness within the context of leisure culture in the British Empire from 1750 to 1850, interrogating how the commercialisation of costumed entertainments was instrumental in establishing and spreading practices of cultural appropriation. It analyses how problematic performances of ‘characters of empire’ manifested themselves in costumes and in the act of dressing up for fancy dress balls and masquerades, raising questions about the emergence of British cultural ideas of racial identity and difference. These entertainments were crucial in shifting racialised performance from the professional stage to commercial leisure culture.
Find a sample of this work here.
Dressing Fancy
The Experience of Georgian Fancy Dress Then and Now
This collaboration with the National Trust at the Bath Assembly Rooms brought the Georgian fancy dress ball to life through an multi-sensory exhibit and immersive event. This project was grounded in research on the history of eighteenth-century fancy dress and examined it through the sensory experiences of the people who made, sold, and consumed fancy dress during their time at the Bath Assembly Rooms. Collaborating with the National Trust and using the knowledge of modern makers of historical costume helped explore new types of learning through multi-sensory, material culture-based engagement that can be applied to other heritage sites, bringing Georgian sociability to life in tactile, smellable, and audible forms.
This project was been awarded funding from the British Academy (SHAPE Involve and Engage) and the Society of Antiquaries of London (Janet Arnold Award).
Publications
Books
The Domino and the Eighteenth-Century Masquerade: A Cultural Biography of a Costume. Elements in Eighteenth-Century Connections. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, November 2023.
Masquerade: Unmasking Georgian London. London: Yale University Press, 2026.
Special Issues & Journal Articles
‘Habits and the Habit of Dressing: Material Culture and the Eighteenth-Century London Masquerade,’ Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 50 (March 2021): 263-290.
‘Dazzling or “Fantastically Dull”? The Social History of the Eighteenth-Century London Masquerade,’ Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 43, no. 2 (June 2020): 161-181.
Online Resources
'Poll Book Directory,’ Eighteenth-Century Political Participation and Electoral Culture, January 2020.
‘George IV, Prince of Wales, and the Habits of the Masquerade,’ Georgian Papers Programme Blog, April 2019.
