Dr Ffion M Jones MA, PhD

Ffion Mair Jones works on eighteenth-century research projects at the Centre. Most recently, she participated in ‘Curious Travellers: Thomas Pennant and the Welsh and Scottish Tour (1760–1820)’, where she worked on transcribing and creating digital editions of parts of Pennant’s extensive and remarkable correspondence. She has a particular interest in Pennant’s Welsh correspondence and in his correspondence with the print-collector Richard Bull; see bibliography for links to online editions of these on ‘Curious Travellers editions’. Further interests include Pennant’s early correspondence; his Continental correspondence and 1765 tour to the Continent; the making of British Zoology; Pennant’s artists; and the reception of Pennant in Welsh-speaking contexts up to the beginning of the 20th century.

Ffion also worked on ‘Iolo Morganwg and the Romantic Tradition in Wales, 1740–1918’, where she co-edited with Geraint H. Jenkins and David Ceri Jones the three-volume Correspondence of Iolo Morganwg (Cardiff, 2007) and wrote a monograph on Iolo’s marginal notes in books and on his correspondence, ‘The Bard is a Very Singular Character’: Iolo Morganwg, Marginalia and Print Culture (Cardiff, 2010).  

Her contribution to the ‘Wales and the French Revolution’ project included a volume of ballads produced between the early years of the Revolution and the end of the Napoleonic wars, Welsh Ballads of the French Revolution 1793–1815 (Cardiff, 2012); several articles on Welsh ballads; and an edition of an interlude by Huw Jones, Glan Conwy, recounting the history of the Revolution from a Welsh perspective.

Ffion’s interest in Welsh correspondence of the eighteenth century led to the creation of a database of the Morris correspondence (1725–86). Other interests include the popular genre of the interlude in Wales. Here, her focus has been on historical material relating to the British Civil Wars of the seventeenth century (see the edition of Huw Morys, Y Rhyfel Cartrefol (Bangor, 2008)) and the American and French revolutions, and on chronicle renditions of stories such as that of King Lear. Alongside this, she has an interest in questions of literacy in the eighteenth century as evidenced in Welsh ballads; and in the Welsh language usage displayed in the Morris letters, in particular with reference to the translation of Enlightenment vocabulary into Welsh.

Eighteenth-century correspondence and correspondence networks, with a focus on Welsh material; implications and potential of network analysis for reading correspondence; scientific and natural history correspondence; representing natural history and landscape in art; antiquarian circles in eighteenth-century Britain; Welsh ballads and folk-plays; translation into Welsh in the eighteenth century