Management

Dr. Mark Towsey – Primary Investigator

Mark is Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Liverpool, and has published extensively on library culture and the history of reading in eighteenth-century Scotland. His first book, Reading the Scottish Enlightenment: Books and their Readers in Provincial Scotland, 1750-1820, was published by Brill in 2010, and he has recently published research on the library borrowing habits of French Napoleonic Prisoners of War and the social life of country house libraries in late Georgian Britain. He currently serves as editor-in-chief of the international peer-review journal Library and Information History.

Dr. Kyle Roberts – Project Partner

Kyle is Assistant Professor of Public History and New Media in the History Department at Loyola University Chicago where he teaches courses on public history, digital humanities, religion, print culture, and North America and the Atlantic World in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.  As a postdoctoral fellow at Queen Mary, University of London and Dr. Williams’s Library from 2009-2011, he worked with a team of researchers, archivists, and technical advisors to create Dissenting Academies Online: Virtual Library System, an innovative reconstruction of the holdings and borrowings of the leading eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English dissenting academies.  He is the Project Director of the Jesuit Libraries Project and the Jesuit Libraries Provenance Project.

Dr. Tessa Whitehouse – Project Partner

Tessa Whitehouse is a Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature at Queen Mary, University of London where she teaches modules on eighteenth-century London, satire, and poetry, and co-convenes the QM Digital Humanities Group. In her research, Tessa has explored the relationship between lecture content and library holdings at orthodox dissenting academies. Part of her current research investigates domestic libraries and the circulation of books within and beyond particular coteries of literary dissenters. Tessa has published articles on book circulation among dissenting academies and across the Atlantic. She has also contributed eight tutor biographies and academy histories for Dissenting Academies Online: Database and Encyclopedia.

Nicholas Bubak – Research Assistant

Nick is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Liverpool. His research focuses mainly on nineteenth and twentieth century British Imperialism. Using the early Boy Scout Movement as a case study, his PhD thesis examines imperial and national identity among Britain’s male youth in the Edwardian period. Other research interests include recruitment, imperial and military adventure literature, New Journalism, and popular culture in print and film.

Aaron Brunmeier – Social Media Assistant

Aaron is a second year PhD student at Loyola University Chicago studying early American and Atlantic world history. Aaron’s research focuses on the public sphere in revolutionary New York, paying particular attention to the multivalent ways in which Americans fought over access to space, both discursive and physical. He also has broader interests in print culture, gender history, and digital history. Aaron recently completed his role as the new media assistant for Common-place Journal.

Participants

Thomas Augst

Thomas Augst is Associate Professor of English and Acting Director of Digital Humanities at New York University. He is currently researching the cultural history of social reform as an NEH Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society. He is the author of The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America. With Kenneth Carpenter, he is coeditor of Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States, and with Wayne Wiegand, coeditor of Libraries as Agencies of Culture.

Jean Bauer

Jean Bauer is the Digital Humanities Librarian at Brown University, where she works with faculty, students, and fellow librarians to design and implement digital systems that showcase and facilitate scholarship in the humanities. Through a combination of formal training and curiosity she is an early American historian, database designer, and photographer. She is finishing her dissertation “Revolution-Mongers: Launching the U.S. Foreign Service, 1775-1825” in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia and has developed The Early American Foreign Service Database. For more information, see her website http://www.jeanbauer.com.

Kenya Bello

Kenya Bello first studied sociology at the National University of Mexico. After graduating, she also studied her postgraduate studies in modern and contemporary history at the Instituto Mora of Mexico City. She is currently working on a Ph.D. thesis on the role of literacy in the elementary schools of Mexico City between 1771 and 1867, at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris, under the direction of Dr. Roger Chartier. Central to her research are the social practices of written culture in modern Mexico, publishers and printers’ editorial strategies, the development of spaces intended for public and private reading, as well as the materiality of the book.

Hester Blum

Hester Blum is Associate Professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University. Her work on nineteenth-century American literature, oceanic studies, and print culture has been published in PMLA, American Literature, J19, and Early American Studies, as well as in multiple collections. She is a founder of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. Her book The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (University of North Carolina Press, 2008) received the John Gardner Maritime Research Award; her critical edition of Horrors of Slavery, William Ray’s 1808 Barbary captivity narrative, appeared from Rutgers in 2008. Blum is at work on a book entitled “Polar Imprints: The Print Culture of Polar Exploration.”

Rebecca Bowd

Rebecca Bowd is in the final year of her PhD in the School of Philosophy, Religion and the History of Science at the University of Leeds. Her PhD thesis, entitled “Subscription Libraries and the Development of Urban Culture in the Age of Revolution: The Case of Leeds, 1768-1832”, examines the growth of industrialized urban spaces through the establishment of subscription libraries in a single provincial locality, Leeds. Her research interests include book history, eighteenth-century history, local history and the history of medicine.

Simon Burrows

Professor Simon Burrows (University of Western Sydney, Australia) is a historian of the European enlightenment and French revolutionary era, whose interests span print culture and the history of the book, intellectual and political history, gender history and the study of cultural transfers. He is best known for his path-breaking AHRC-funded digital humanities project on the ‘French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe’ and his innovative work on French exile writers in Britain between the 1750s and 1820s. Prior to moving to UWS in January 2013, he held a lectureship at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand (1993-2000) and was successively Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Professor of Modern European History at the University of Leeds.

James Caudle

James Caudle (PhD Yale, AB Harvard) has served as The Associate Editor of the Yale Editions of James Boswell since 2000, and before that was a tenured Assistant Professor at Ouachita. He has co-edited of three of the prior volumes in the research edition of Boswell, and is now editing Boswell’s Earliest Journals, 1758–1763. His interest in texts outside the Yale Editions’ boundaries is mainly focused on Boswell’s political writings, poems and songs, and anecdotes. His work focuses on the history of the book, especially on mass communications of political ideas through the media of newspaper and magazine essays, pamphlets, and sermons, on censorship and copyright, and on sociability and social verse.  His recent work includes essays in the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain 1695-1830, The Age of Johnson, and Oxford Handbook of the British Sermon, 1689-1901.

James Connolly

James Connolly is the Director of the Center for Middletown Studies, Professor of History at Ball State University and Co-Director of the What Middletown Read Project. His publications include An Elusive Unity: Urban Democracy and Machine Politics in Industrial America (2010), The Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism: Urban Political Culture in Boston, 1900-1925 (1998), and numerous essays on the political, social, and cultural history of American cities. He is currently collaborating with Frank Felsenstein on “What Middletown Read: Print Culture and Cosmopolitanism in an American Small City.”

John Crawford

John Crawford is a former chair of the Library and Information History Group and also served as a trustee of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals from 2010 to 2012. He was from 2004 until 2009 Director of the Scottish Information Literacy Project, the first project of its kind in the British Isles. He has published extensively in the areas of evaluation of library and information services, information literacy, and library and information history, having authored three books, the most recent of which, Information literacy and lifelong learning. Oxford: Chandos, 2013, he co-authored with Christine Irving. He has also written some ninety articles. Since retirement he has become chair of an online community of practice, The Right Information: Information Skills for a 21st Century Scotland, the successor project to the Scottish Information Literacy Project. In 2013 he became chair of Leadhills Heritage Trust. The Trust’s principal collection is the library of Leadhills Reading Society, Britain’s first and oldest subscription library.

Brian Davidson

Brian Davidson is currently a master’s student at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois—Urbana-Champaign, where he is focusing on rare books, special collections, and bibliography. He received his MA in European Studies in 2012 from Yale University, where he worked with Keith Wrightson and Steve Pincus and studied the history of reading and libraries in the Atlantic world in the eighteenth century. His Master’s thesis compared the varying scope of the provincial book markets in Newcastle and Bath with that of London in the 1760s, focusing on newspaper advertisements. He is interested in long eighteenth-century British and Atlantic intellectual and cultural history, the history of advertising, books, and the print trades, and the history of libraries.

Rachel Eckersley

Dr. Eckersley has previously worked as a research assistant in history at Wolverhampton University (1999-2000), as a researcher in Education at Manchester Metropolitan University (2000-02), and as a research manager in Humanities for the University of Manchester (2004-10). During 2012-13 she worked as a research assistant (part time) on the AHRC-funded project ‘Private Books for Educational Use – the Formation of the Northern Congregational College Library’, based at QMUL, and is one of the editors of the relaunched Virtual Library System (September 2013 http://vls.english.qmul.ac.uk/). She is currently one of two editors for Trinity College, Cambridge’s digital library project http://sites.trin.cam.ac.uk/james/ and is a research associate at the Dr Williams’s Centre for Dissenting Studies http://www.english.qmul.ac.uk/drwilliams/index.html

She is interested in the political and intellectual history of Britain during the long eighteenth century, particularly the radical-liberal tradition, rational dissent, and the history of education.

James Egan

Professor Egan has published Oriental Shadows: The Presence of the East in Early American Literature (2011) and Authorizing Experience: Refigurations of the Body Politic in Seventeenth-Century New England Writing (1999). He is currently collaborating with Jean Bauer on Mapping Colonial American Publishing, a digital project that aims to visualize New World printing over geographic space and across literary genres from European contact to 1800, and he is working as well on a history of American literature before 1783.

Markman Ellis

Markman Ellis is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of The Politics of Sensibility (1996), The History of Gothic Fiction (2000), The Coffee-House: a Cultural History (2004), and Empire of Tea (forthcoming 2015). He edited Eighteenth-Century Coffee House Culture (2006) and Tea and the Tea-Table in Eighteenth-Century England (2010). He has also published ‘Coffee-house Libraries in Mid Eighteenth-Century London’ (The Library, 2009) and ‘Coffee-House Library Short-title Catalogue’, Bibliographical Society: Electronic Publications (2009).

Frank Felsenstein

Frank Felsenstein, Reed D. Voran Honors Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Ball State University, co-directs with Dr. James Connolly, the “What Middletown Read” project (www.bsu.edu/libraries.wmr). As well as the database, a complementary book is under advanced negotiation with an academic  publisher. Dr. Felsenstein has held positions at the Universities of Geneva, Leeds, Vanderbilt, and Yeshiva College. Among books written or edited by him are Anti-Semitic Stereotypes (Johns Hopkins, 1995), English Trader, Indian Maid (Johns Hopkins, 1999), and editions of Tobias Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy (Broadview Press, 2011) and plays by John Thelwall (Associated University Presses, 2006). He teaches classes, among others, on eighteenth-century literature, and on the history of the book.

Louisiane Ferlier

Louisiane Ferlier lectures at the University of Oxford, Oriel College – Jesus College. Her doctoral dissertation in English Studies – British History from the University Paris-Diderot, Paris 7 consisted of the intellectual biography of Quaker author George Keith (1639-1716), to be published by Honoré Champion. Her main research is on religious mobility in the 17th and 18th centuries. Particularly interested in transatlantic exchanges, she focuses on the evolution of the Quaker print culture at the turn of the century. Currently, she analyses the different centers of the transatlantic Quaker booktrade, such as communities of authors, print shops or libraries.

César Manrique Figueroa

Dr. César Manrique studied history at the National University of Mexico. He has recently achieved his doctoral degree in history from the University of Leuven (KUL), Belgium. At present, he is a research fellow at the John Carter Brown Library (JCB) in Providence. His main research interests are in bibliographical and artistic exchanges between the Southern Netherlands and the Hispanic World between the 16th and 17th centuries. Central to him is the question of how books published in the Southern Netherlands were commercialized, distributed and consumed in colonial Mexico, as well as written culture and censorship in Early Modern Europe. Among his recent publications are: ‘Studying Book in Hispanic America. The Process of Consolidation of National Identities’, Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis, Nijmegen, 2013, and ‘Los impresores bruselenses y su producción dirigida al mercado hispano, siglos XVI-XVII…’, Erebea. Revista de Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales, 2 (2012), 205-226.

Christy Ford

Christy Ford is a first-year doctoral student at Somerville College, Oxford, where she holds the Lord Dacre Scholarship in History. She has a long-standing interest in eighteenth-century ideas about education and intellect. She focused on charity schools for her undergraduate thesis, before moving on to libraries and book clubs in my postgraduate research. She is supervised by Dr Faramerz Dabhoiwala.

Mitch Fraas

Mitch Fraas is the scholar in residence at the Kislak Center for Special Collections at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries and is also the interim director of the Penn Digital Humanities Forum. His doctoral dissertation examined the legal culture of British India in the 17th and 18th centuries, arguing for the existence of a unified early modern British imperial legal culture whether in Philadelphia, Bombay, or London. As part of this work he began tracking the movement of texts of all kinds between South Asia and the Atlantic World. Mitch also takes a keen interest in library and book history as well as the digital humanities, writing frequently for the Penn Libraries at Unique at Penn and on his own Mapping Books Websites: http://uniqueatpenn.wordpress.com/ and http://mappingbooks.blogspot.com/.

Junia Furtado

Dr. Furtado is a full Professor of Modern History at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais/Brazil, having held visiting positions at Princeton University, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and Instituto de Ciências Sociais at Universidade de Lisboa. She has published several books and articles about Colonial Brazil and slavery, including Chica da Silva: A Brazilian Slave of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2009), which won awards from the Carlos Chagas Foundation for Women and Gender Research and the Ford Foundation. Her research interests include libraries in 18^th-century Brazil and Portugal, and Brazil-Dahomey scientific connections.

Rosa Dalia Valdez Garza

Dalia Valdez studied Hispanic letters at the State University of Nuevo León (UANL) in Monterrey, Mexico. She recently obtained her Ph.D. in humanistic studies with specialization in literature from the Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM). Her thesis is a study on the Mexican Gazette (Gazeta de Literatura de México) published from 1788 to 1795, with particular emphasis on the history of the book, the circles of readers, and the printing culture of 18th century Mexico. Her publications include ‘Decisiones ortográficas, propuestas tipográficas y de lectura en la edición de tres textos publicados en la Gazeta de literatura de México (1788-1795)’, in Memorias del Congreso Internacional ‘Las Edades del Libro’ (México, 2012) and (together with J.A. Cervera), ‘Lectores de la prensa y otros escritos científicos de José Antonio Alzate’, in the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies (2013), 1-17.

David J. Gary

David J. Gary is the Kaplanoff Librarian for American History at Yale University. He holds an MLS from City University of New York-Queens College and a Ph.D. in American History from the City University of New York-Graduate Center, where he focused on the history of the book and the Early American Republic.  His dissertation focused on the collecting and reading activity of the politician and diplomat Rufus King (1755-1827), who amassed a 3,500 volume library over the course of his lifetime.

Gabor Gelleri

Dr Gelleri is Lecturer in French at Aberystwyth University, and his main research field is travel studies. His current research explores the reception of travel literature in the long eighteenth century, based on both quantitative and qualitative study of French library records of the period. His publications include ‘La représentation du pouvoir dans le discours huguenot’, Seventeenth-Century French Studies, 32.1 (2010), pp.61-73.

Tom Glynn

Tom Glynn has been the British and American history librarian at Rutgers University since August 2000. He received his doctorate in history from Auburn University in 2005 for a dissertation entitled “Books in the Public Sphere: New York Libraries and the Culture-Building Enterprise, 1754-1904.” Since then he has published a number of articles on public library history, most of them in the journal Libraries & Culture. Dr. Glynn’s book, Reading Publics: New York City’s Public Libraries, 1754-1911, will be published by Fordham University Press in November 2014.He is a former chair of the American Library Association’s Library History Round Table and continues to be active in the round table’s work.

Marina Garone Gravier

Dr. Marina Garone Gravier completed her Ph.D. in art history at the National University of Mexico (UNAM), achieving three outstanding doctoral dissertation distinctions in Mexico in 2010 and 2011. She has been a researcher in the Bibliographical Research Institute (Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas, IIB) of the National University of Mexico (UNAM) since 2009. Marina is also a member of the National System of Researchers (SNI) of the Mexican National Science Foundation (CONACyT); currently she is the coordinator of the Mexican Newspaper Library (Hemeroteca Nacional de México), and director of the Interdisciplinary Seminar of Bibliology at IIB (Seminario Interdisciplinario de Bibliología, SIB-IIB).

Her research interests lie in the field of history of the book, Latin American printing culture, books issued in native American languages, as well as gender and design studies related to typography. Among her recent publications are: Una historia en cubierta. Fondo de Cultura Económica a través de sus portadas (1934-2009) (Mexico, 2011); La tipografía en México. Ensayos históricos (siglos XVI-XIX) (Mexico, 2012); Marina Garone (ed.), Miradas a la cultura del libro en Puebla. Bibliotecas, tipógrafos, grabadores, libreros y ediciones en la época colonial, Mexico, 2012.

Sally E. Hadden

Dr. Hadden’s principal research and teaching is in American legal and constitutional history. These interdisciplinary fields overlap heavily with social and cultural history, and for her first book, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (2001), intersected with the history of slavery and race before 1865. Her temporal focus is on American history prior to 1865, particularly the eighteenth century; this period forms the setting for her current monograph on legal professionals in Boston, Philadelphia and Charleston. She has taught a wide variety of courses, including: Colonial America; Colonial Women’s History; Revolutionary America; the Old South; the Civil War; English Legal History; the Atlantic World; Historical Methods; and Historiography. Her graduate students have worked on a variety of American and Atlantic World topics, including women’s history, newspapers and readership, the early American navy, British politics of the Georgian period, religion and the Bill of Rights, the Florida and Northwest Territories, and antebellum legal history. She is a member of the AHA, SHA, OAH and ASLH as well as the Massachusetts Bar Association.

John Haggerty

Dr. Haggerty is Lecturer in Information Systems Security at the University of Salford. His main research interests include network security, computer forensics, signature matching and mobile computing and publishes extensively in these areas. He is also currently working on an inter-disciplinary, collaborative project with the School of History, University of Nottingham, developing new methodologies and software for the analysis of 18th century British-Atlantic networks.

Sheryllynne Haggerty

Dr. Haggerty is a Reader in Economic and Business History at the University of Nottingham. She received her PhD from the University of Liverpool in 2002. Her main area of study is the business culture and trading communities of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic, but is also involved in interdisciplinary work on networks. Her second monograph, ‘Merely for Money’? Business Culture in the British-Atlantic, 1750-1815, was published by Liverpool University Press in 2012. She sits on the council of several national societies, including the Economic History Society and the Association of Business Historians.

Katherine Halsey

Dr. Halsey is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature at the University of Stirling. Her publications include her monograph, Jane Austen and her Readers, 1786-1945 (2012), and the edited volumes The History of Reading (2010), co-edited with Shafquat Towheed and Rosalind Crone, The History of Reading, vol 2: Evidence from the British Isles (2011), co-edited with W.R. Owens, and The Concept and Practice of Conversation in the Long Eighteenth Century (2008), co-edited with Jane Slinn. She is also the author of various articles on Jane Austen, Mary Russell Mitford, Margaret Oliphant, the history of reading, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and print culture more broadly. Her current research is on the lending records of Innerpeffray Library, in Perthshire.

David Hancock

David Hancock is Professor of History at The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and Director of its Atlantic Studies Initiative.  He teaches and researches on the history of Early America, the Atlantic World, the British Empire, and Business.  A specialist on the long eighteenth century, he is the author of Citizens of the World:  London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735-1785 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), a study of how and why London entrepreneurs integrated the First British Empire.  His second publication was an edition of The Letters of William Freeman, London Merchant, 1678-1685 (London Record Society, 2002), one of Britain’s earliest sugar planters, slave traders, and commission merchants.  His most recent study – of the emergence and self-organization of the Atlantic economy between 1640 and 1815 as viewed through the lens of Madeira wine production, distribution, and consumption – appeared in 2009 as Oceans of Wine:  Madeira and the Emergence of American Trade and Taste (Yale University Press).  Professor Hancock received his A.B. degree in History and Music from the College of William and Mary, an A.M. in Music from Yale University in 1983, and an A.M. and a Ph.D.  in History from Harvard University in 1990.  He has also taught at Harvard University (1990-1997), the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris (2003), and the Queen Mary School of Business and Management, University of London (2008).  Most recently, he was the R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellow at The Huntington Library, in San Marino, California during 2012-2013, as well as a recipient of The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.

Cheryl Knott

An Associate Professor in the University of Arizona’s School of Information Resources and Library Science since 2001, Cheryl Knott conducts research on the history of information access and particularly on the development of American library collections and services. Her articles in scholarly journals, including Library Quarterly, Libraries & Culture, and Library Trends, have focused on the history of libraries for African Americans in the segregated South. She is the author of the entry on “African Americans and U.S. Libraries: History” in the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science (Taylor and Francis, 2010). In 2011 she began a new line of inquiry, presenting preliminary information about a proposed overlap study of social libraries as part of an “Early American Libraries Roundtable” at the biennial conference of the Society of Early Americanists.  She holds a PhD in Library and Information Science from the University of Texas at Austin and master’s degrees in History and in Library Science from the University of Arizona.

Rob Koehler

Rob Koehler is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at New York University. He works at the intersections of the history of education, literature, and publishing.  His dissertation examines American attitudes toward schooling in the early United States by reading educational theorists and literary texts together in their original contexts of publication.  His work on early American social and circulating libraries, particularly the New York Society Library, is a parallel project that attempts to articulate a nuanced account of what libraries meant to the early American public.

Julieanne Lamond

Dr. Lamond is a Lecturer in English at the Australian National University. She has published widely in the field of 19th century Australian literary culture and reading history, and has published a number of essays on the use of digital methodologies for reading history, approaches to studying communities of readers and local reading patterns. She has been an invited speaker at several conferences on print culture history and the use of online resources, must recently at the NEH-funded conference “Print Culture Histories Beyond the Metropolis.”  From late 2013 she will be managing the Australian Common Reader database, and is currently undertaking a comparative study of these records alongside some four million records from an Australian library from 2004-2012.

Jordan Landes

Jordan Landes is a research librarian at Senate House Library but is also an historian of Quaker Atlantic networks, including the transatlantic Quaker book trade.

Isabelle Lehuu

Isabelle is Associate Professor of History at the University of Quebec, Montreal.   She is the author of Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America (2000) and editor of Blanches et Noires: Histoire(s) des Américaines au XIXe siècle (2011).  Her recent publications in book history include articles in The History of Reading, Vol.1: International Perspectives, c.1500-1990 (2011) and in Popular Culture in American History (2013). She is researching borrowing records of early nineteenth-century libraries in the American South and is interested in the transmission of book culture through familial, regional, national, and transatlantic connections.  She currently serves as President of the Canadian Association for the Study of Book Culture (CASBC-ACEHL).

José Leonardo Hernández López

Leonardo Hernández received his bachelor in ethnohistory from the National School of Anthropology and History (ENAH), Mexico. He is presently in the final stage of his work for the master thesis at the Department of History of the National University of Mexico, focusing on book trade networks and book distribution throughout the viceroyalty of New Spain during the 17th century. His research interests include printing culture, legislation and censorship on books and transgression in early modern Mexico. He is also interested in the application of new publishing technologies for current editorial activity.

Since 2012 he joined the Editorial Department of the Bibliographical Research Institute at National University of Mexico (Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas, IIB-UNAM) and has reviewed different books on history of science for the Journal Ciencia y Desarrollo of the Mexican National Science Foundation (CONACyT), currently two articles of his research are in press: ‘Breve acercamiento a las redes de comercio y distribución de libros en la Nueva España, 1630-1684’, and ‘Erratas, erratones y tramperos. Cazando a los roedores de palabras’.

Kate Loveman

Dr. Loveman works on reading behaviour in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, particularly in relation to politics and sociability. Her current research uses the papers of Samuel Pepys to explore reading, news-gathering, and collecting in the period 1660-1703. Website: http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/english/people/kateloveman.

Arnold Lubbers

Dr. Lubbers worked as a lecturer and PhD researcher at the department of Book & Manuscript Studies at the University of Amsterdam in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He primarily taught on Dutch institutional reading culture in the long nineteenth century, which is also the focus of his research. He published on book clubs and their choice of literature in the context of rising nationalism. He is currently preparing a research project on commercial circulating libraries in the Netherlands.

Jason McElligott

Dr. McElligott is The Keeper of Marsh’s Library, a perfectly preserved late-Renaissance / early-Enlightenment library in Dublin. When it opened in 1707 it was the first public library in Ireland. It contains more than 30,000 books, and its collections are strongly European and British in focus. Dr. McElligott has wide-ranging interests in the history of books, libraries and reading in the early modern period, but has a particular focus on the theory and practice of censorship. Webpage: http://www.marshlibrary.ie/the-keeper/.

Jane McLeod

Jane McLeod is Associate Professor of History at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. Following on her recent publication, Licensing Loyalty: Printers, Patrons and the State in Early Modern France (2011), her interest in state-media relations continues in her current research: “Printers Confront the French Revolution: Profits, Principles and Perils.”

Jon Mee

Jon is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies and Director of the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies at York. His most recent book is Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community 1762-1830 (Oxford University Press, 2011) based on research funded by a Phillip J. Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship. He is currently the PI a Leverhulme Major Project Grant on ‘Networks of Improvement: Literary Clubs and Societies, 1760-1840’. The project understands the ‘literary’ in a broad sense – both supply and demand side – and covers book clubs and readings societies as well as institutions like the Literary and Philosophical Societies who developed their own libraries as part of their activities

Laura Miller

Dr. Laura Miller is Assistant Professor of English at the University of West Georgia, specializing in eighteenth-century literature, science and literature, and publishing history. She is currently researching the borrowing habits of readers at the New York Society Library from 1789-1792 as part of a larger project on scientific popularization. Webpage: http://www.westga.edu/english/show_bio.php?emp_id=35657.

Sean Moore

Sean Moore (Ph.D. Duke U. 2003) does research that is focused on postcolonial, economic, and book history approaches to Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, with a particular focus on the cultures of Ireland and the Anglophone Atlantic. His monograph, Swift, the Book, and the Irish Financial Revolution: Satire and Sovereignty in Colonial Ireland (Johns Hopkins UP 2010), won the 2010 Donald Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Book from the American Conference for Irish Studies. It argues that Jonathan Swift helped to mobilize the Irish print media for the promotion of Ireland’s cultural, political, and economic sovereignty. His new book project, entitled “Slavery and the Making of the Early American Library,” studies how the transatlantic book trade – the purchase of London printed books by Americans eager for British cultural capital and identity – was enabled by the philanthropy of colonial slave traders and by the consumer habits of slave owners. He continues to also work in Irish Studies, however, and has just edited and published “Ireland and Enlightenment,” a special issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies that explores the influence of Continental and British philosophy on Ireland and the rise of an indigenous Irish Enlightenment. Dr. Moore’s articles have appeared in PMLA, Atlantic Studies, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, and other journals and essay collections. For one of these essays, he received the international Richard H. Rodino Prize from the Ehrenpreis Centre for Swift Studies in Münster, Germany. He has held fellowships from the John Carter Brown Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Fulbright program, Duke University, and UNH.

Elizabeth Neiman

Since completing her Ph.D. in June 2011 at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Dr. Neiman has worked as a visiting assistant professor of English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maine; she started a tenure-track position here this fall. Her research interests include British Romanticism, nineteenth-century novels, print culture and authorship, feminist theory and pedagogy, and the digital humanities. Some of her early work on the Minerva Press is published in Global Economies, Cultural Currencies of the Eighteenth Century (AMS Press, 2012). A recent article is now under review by the European Romantic Review. Presently, she is expanding her research to quantify some of the claims that she makes about Minerva Press authorship and the effects of Minerva production and circulation on authors, novels, and the literary marketplace.

Angel O’Donnell

Angel O’Donnell is currently writing up a PhD thesis on the crowd and print culture in colonial Philadelphia entitled ‘Tangible Imaginations: Community, Print Culture, and American Identity in Philadelphia, 1764 – 1776’. The project looks at the role that texts played in animating the American Revolution. Angel’s research interests include study of the material text, the intellectual life of the inarticulate, crowd action, and political engagement.

Katherine Parker

Katherine Parker is a PhD candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. Her dissertation focuses on the production of geographic knowledge about the Pacific by British explorers, geographers, natural philosophers, and readers. A significant portion of her work focuses on the circulation of ideas via printed maps and geographic books. Many of these were popular parts of circulating library collections. Readers learned about the Pacific world–an extension of the Atlantic world–via circulating library content (among other places and methods), making for localized understandings of faraway places and peoples.

Sue Peabody

Sue Peabody, Professor of History at Washington State University Vancouver (USA), writes about slavery and race in France to 1850. Her publications include: “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (Oxford, 1996); The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, co-edited with Tyler Stovall (Duke, 2003); and Slavery, Freedom and the Law in the Atlantic World: A Brief History with Documents, (Bedford, 2008), as well as articles in journals such as Slavery and Abolition, French Historical Studies, and Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales. Formerly president of the French Colonial Historical Society, she currently holds an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship while completing a social biography of a family held in slavery in France’s Indian Ocean empire.

Stephen Pentecost

Stephen Pentecost is Senior Digital Humanities Specialist at Washington University in St. Louis, where he supports faculty research in the humanities. The projects he supports include the development of a new, born-digital critical edition of the works of Edmund Spenser; the creation of datasets documenting the growth of the federal government following the ratification of the U.S. Constitution; investigations into text mining in support of literary criticism; and Professor Lynne Tatlock’s research into the American reception and circulation of Germans novel in translation.  His involvement in the history of reading is based on data mining performed with the assistance of the What Middletown Read project at Ball State University.

Christopher N. Phillips

Dr. Phillips is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Lafayette College.

Dr. Mark Reid

Dr. Reid is a Research Fellow in the Research School of Computer Science at the Australian National University. He is an internationally-recognised researcher in Machine Learning, has published widely on statistical approaches to inference and market mechanisms, and is currently undertaking two Australian Research Council-funded projects in the field.

Dr. Isabel Rivers

Isabel Rivers is Professor of Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture in the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary University of London, and has interests in dissenting, Methodist, and evangelical literary culture, intellectual and religious history, and the history of the book 1660-1830. She is Principal Investigator for the Dissenting Academies Project http://www.english.qmul.ac.uk/drwilliams/academies.html, with David Wykes as Project Partner. Two aspects are particularly relevant to the Community Libraries project: Dissenting Academies Online: Virtual Library System http://vls.english.qmul.ac.uk/, which represents the holdings of the principal Congregational, Presbyterian (later Unitarian), and Baptist academies in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the substantial chapter on ‘Libraries’, which also includes Methodist ones, in the forthcoming multi-authored A History of the Dissenting Academies in the British Isles, 1660-1860.

Dunstan C. D. Roberts

Sue Roe and Loveday Herridge

For the past 3 years they have been involved in Reading Sheffield, a community group which aims to explore and share the experiences of Sheffield readers. Their first project has focused on memories of reading in the 1940s and 1950s. They have collected sixty reading histories in the form of oral histories and these interviews reflect the creativity with which these readers, usually with few books in the home, found the books they read and developed their reading tastes. A striking feature of the information gathered is the importance attached to Sheffield’s local and central libraries in the reading lives of our interviewees. This has led to an investigation of earlier experiences of reading in Sheffield and the development of public libraries which have formed such an important part of the reading experience of our interviewees.

Matthew Sangster

Dr. Sangster completed his PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London in 2012, submitting a thesis entitled ‘Living as an Author in the Romantic Period: Remuneration, Recognition and Self-Fashioning’. As part of this project he catalogued the archive of the Royal Literary Fund at the British Library, where he also co-curated the 2011 exhibition ‘The Worlds of Mervyn Peake’.  His current research is on the ways that definitions of literature manifested in institutional practices during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; as part of this project, he has recently spent four months as a Fleeman Fellow at the University of St. Andrews, working on the library’s borrowing registers, catalogues, accession lists and surviving eighteenth-century books.

Erin Schreiner

Erin Schreiner is the Special Collections Librarian at the New York Society Library. She holds an MLIS from the Palmer School of Library and Information Science in New York and has studied bibliography and book history extensively at Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, where she was the Goldschmidt Fellow in 2011. Her work at the Society Library focuses mainly on physical manifestations of readership in the Society Library’s collections and archive. At the moment, she is co-curating an exhibition of annotated books in the Library’s collections (opening February 2015), and directing a digital project to design and publish a digital collections portal for materials from the Library’s archives, including the existing Early Circulation Records Database. This new site will include, among other things, new applications for data visualization and faceted searching, providing researchers with permanent public access to our Library’s historic collection and the tools to explore it in the digital environment.

Norbert Schürer

Norbert Schürer is an associate professor in the English department at California State University, Long Beach. His teaching and research focus on British women’s writing, book history, and Anglo-Indian literature in the long eighteenth century. Recent publications include the edition Charlotte Lennox: Correspondence and Miscellaneous Documents (Bucknell 2012) and the anthology British Encounters with India, 1750-1830 (with Tim Keirn, Palgrave Macmillan 2011). In 2012, Norbert Schürer curated with exhibition “Jane Austen’s Bookshop” (with Chris Mounsey and Debbie Welham) at Chawton House Library. He is an associate editor of the forthcoming Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of British Literature, 1660-1789.

Cristina Soriano

Dr. Soriano is an Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Villanova University, Pennsylvania. Her postdoctoral research and book project, entitled “The Revolutionary Contagion: Peripheral Literacies, Circulation of Information, and Social Mobilization In Venezuela During the Age of Revolutions” seeks to analyze the complex connections between literacy practices, the dynamics of circulation of information, the configuration of social networks, and political mobilization in Venezuela during the Age of the Revolutions.  This project links her interests in the history of reading and the social dynamics of knowledge transmission within a hierarchical society with more recent concerns on the Revolutionary Atlantic, the emergence of a public sphere, subaltern politics, social movements, and colonial insurgency. An important part of her work, explores the expansion and transformation of private libraries and its connection with the configuration of social networks for the circulation of information in colonial Venezuela during the Age of Revolutions (1770-1815).

Mark G. Spencer

Mark G. Spencer’s current research projects include a SSHRCC-supported volume on David Hume as historian (contracted with Penn State University Press) and editorship of The Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment, supported by a Chancellor’s Chair for Research Excellence. He is the author or editor of eight published volumes, including David Hume and Eighteenth-Century America (University of Rochester Press, 2005) his monograph which was reissued in a paperback edition in 2010. That book was based on his PhD dissertation (UWO, 2001) which was awarded a Governor General’s Gold Medal and also the John Bullen Prize of the Canadian Historical Association as the best history PhD in Canada. Much of his research involves the dissemination of ideas in the 18^th-century British Atlantic world, including the history of libraries, reading and book collecting.

Wayne A. Wiegand

Wayne Wiegand is F. William Summers Professor Emeritus in the School of Library and Information Studies at Florida State University. In addition to over 100 scholarly articles, he is the author of Politics of an Emerging Profession: The American Library Association, 1876-1917 (1986), “An Active Instrument for Propaganda:” American Public Libraries During World War I (1989), Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey (1996), and Main Street Public Library: Reading Spaces and Community Places in America’s Heartland, 1876-1956 (2011).

Lynda K. Yankaskas

Dr. Yankaskas is an Assistant Professor of History at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, having earned her Ph.D. (2009) in American history from Brandeis University. She is a social and cultural historian of early America, with particular interests in the history of print culture, nation-formation, public space, and gender. Her current research project examines social (or subscription) libraries to explore the meanings of reading as a public activity, and the ways that national and local identity and questions of class were mediated through trans-Atlantic print culture in the late colonial period and the early American republic. In particular, her work argues that print culture could be as much an anti-democratic force as a democratic one in the young American nation.