A Consortium fellowship will enable me to conduct research at the Huntington and Newberry libraries for The Afterlife of Alchemy, a book-length project that the examines the revitalization of alchemical ideas during Britain’s long 18th-century (ca. 1660-1830), the era typically characterized as the historical moment when alchemy’s fortunes waned to extinction. This project focuses specifically on distillation and sublimation, which served not only as methods in modern chemistry, but also as thematic launching points for arguments in nonscientific contexts ranging from philosophy to popular social commentary, where these techniques often retained an element of magical thinking. Afterlife thus considers such alchemical concepts as sites of intense literary and sociocultural contestation; it also extends previous revisionist scholarship on alchemy in the 18th century by investigating the specific ways that refashioned alchemical thinking informed both British aesthetics and political thought during the period. The authors it will examine include Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Margaret Cavendish, Daniel Defoe, Edmund Burke, and Mary Wollstonecraft.