Annika Bautz
is Associate Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature and Head of the School of Humanities and Performing Arts at Plymouth University. Her publications include books and essays on Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Edward Bulwer-Lytton and George Eliot, and on the history of the book in the Romantic and Victorian periods.
Alistair Black
is full Professor in the School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Amongst his books are A New History of the English Public Library (1996), The Early Information Society in Britain, 1900–1960 (2007) and Libraries of Light (2016), a socio-architectural history of public libraries in Britain in the long 1960s. He is co-editor of Volume iii of the Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland (2006), covering the period 1850 to 2000.
James J. Caudle
is Research Associate at the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History. His scholarship focuses on the history of the book, especially censorship and copyright, on sociability and social verse, and on mass communications of political ideas through the media of newspaper and magazine essays, pamphlets, and sermons. His recent work has appeared in the Journal of Religious History, Literature and Culture and The Age of Johnson, and he supplied the preface to Terry Seymour’s Boswell’s Books: Four Generations of Collecting and Collectors (2016). He served as The Associate Editor of the Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell from 2000 to 2017.
Rachel Eckersley
is Visiting Research Fellow at The Queen Mary Centre for Religion and Literature in English, Queen Mary University of London, and is one of the editors of the Dissenting Academies Online: Virtual Library System. She was previously a postdoctoral researcher at The Centre for the Comparative History of Print, University of Leeds, and is currently researching provincial printing, female benefactors to dissenting academies and women as private owners of dissenting books.
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
Louisiane Ferlier
is Research Associate at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at University College London. She is the author of an intellectual biography of schismatic Quaker author George Keith (1639–1716), Itinéraire dans la Dissidence (2016), and is currently curating the digital archive of the Royal Society periodicals for 1665–1996.
Júnia Ferreira Furtado
is full Professor of Early Modern History at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil, and currently Visiting Scholar at Universidade Federal Fluminense. Her publications include Chica da Silva: The Myth of a Slave Woman (2009) and The Map that Invented Brazil (2013), which won the best book prize in the Human Sciences category for the 2014 edition of the Jabuti Award. She is currently working on two book projects, one on eighteenth-century cartographies of South Africa, and the other on two Luso-Brazilian enlightened priests who travelled to Dahomey between 1796 and 1798.
Tom Glynn
is a librarian at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, serving as the bibliographer and liaison for British and American history, the history of science, political science and American studies. He is the author of Reading Publics: New York City’s Public Libraries, 1754–1911 (2015).
Katie Halsey
is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature at the University of Stirling. Her publications include Jane Austen and her Readers, 1786–1945 (2012), The History of Reading (edited with Rosalind Crone and Shafquat Towheed, 2010), The History of Reading: Evidence from the British Isles (edited with Bob Owens, 2011), The Concept and Practice of Conversation (edited with Jane Slinn, 2008) and Shakespeare and Authority (edited with Angus Vine, 2017).
Loveday Herridge
taught in further education for 20 years, and also worked in museums and in publishing, in London and in Sheffield. She is a member of Reading Sheffield,
Cheryl Knott
is on the faculty of the University of Arizona’s School of Information. She is the author of Not Free, Not for All: Public Libraries in the Age of Jim Crow (2015), which won the Eliza Atkins Gleason Book Award presented by the Library History Round Table of the American Library Association and the Lillian Smith Book Award from the Southern Regional Council, University of Georgia Libraries, DeKalb County Public Library/Georgia Center for the Book and Piedmont College. Her articles on library history have been published in a variety of journals including Libraries & Culture and The Library Quarterly.
Rob Koehler
is a Ph.D. candidate in English at New York University. He is currently completing a dissertation that examines early literary depictions of schooling in Great Britain and the United States and the rise of ideas about mass education. He has contributed reviews to Nineteenth-Century Prose and the Journal of the Early Republic, and is a Contributing Editor at the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog.
Christopher N. Phillips
is Associate Professor of English at Lafayette College. He is the author of Epic in American Culture, Settlement to Reconstruction (2012) and The Hymnal Before the Notes: A History of Reading and Practice (2018), work supported by funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. He is also the principal investigator for the Easton Library Company Database Project, a digital study of the history of the elc’s use in the period 1811–62.
Kyle B. Roberts
is Associate Professor of Public History and New Media and Director of the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities at Loyola University Chicago. His publications include Evangelical Gotham: Religion and the Making of New York City, 1783–1860 (2016) and Crossings and Dwellings: Restored Jesuits, Women Religious, American Experience 1814–2014 (edited with Stephen Schloesser, 2017). He is one of the creators of Dissenting Academies Online: Virtual Library System (http://vls.english.qmul.ac.uk/) and Project Director of the Jesuit Libraries Provenance Project (http://jesuitlibrariesprovenanceproject.com/).
is a retired teacher of history. She worked in a comprehensive school and a tertiary college in Sheffield for a total of 38 years. She is a member of Reading Sheffield, a community group with its roots in an oral history project to discover what Sheffield people read during the 1930s and 1940s, and how and why their reading habit was formed. She was also involved in the interviewing for an oral history book on a West Yorkshire Rugby League Club.
April G. Shelford
is Associate Professor of History at American University. She specialises in the intellectual history of early modern Europe and is the author of Transforming the Republic of Letters: Pierre-Daniel Huet and European Intellectual Life, 1650–1720 (2007) and articles in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Atlantic Studies and the History of European Ideas. She won the Selma Forkosch prize for the best article published in the Journal of the History of Ideas in 2002.
Mark Towsey
is Reader in Modern British History and Director of the Eighteenth-Century Worlds Research Centre at the University of Liverpool. He has published extensively on the history of libraries, reading experiences and the social life of the mind in the long eighteenth century, including his first book Reading the Scottish Enlightenment: Books and their Readers in Provincial Scotland, 1750–1835 (2010). He served as editor of Library & Information History between 2012 and 2016, and has previously held a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (2014–15) and the Bibliographical Society of America’s Katherine F. Pantzer Senior Fellowship (2015).
Lynda K. Yankaskas
is Associate Professor of History at Muhlenberg College. 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 monograph in progress examines social 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.