Before the advent of modern public libraries in the United States and United Kingdom in the mid-nineteenth century, readers availed themselves of an array of subscription, commercial, private, religious, and other libraries for their edification and enjoyment. Rooted in regional communities, these libraries became emblems of local pride and exceptionalism, stimulating and promoting local culture, politics, civic infrastructure, and educational provision. Libraries fostered communities of readers whose shared reading connected them to each other and to millions of other readers across the western world.
In this talk, four leading historians of English, Scottish, and American libraries will reveal the diverse ways that library history can illuminate different facets of the past. All are co-investigators on the recent major AHRC-funded grant entitled Libraries, Reading Communities, and Cultural Formation in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic, which is launching a major new web resource in early 2024 that features fully searchable membership lists, catalogues, and borrowing records from more than eighty libraries across the Anglophone Atlantic. The talk will feature a demonstration of this powerful new web resource.
The event is free to all, but registration is required via this link: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_yrOkAt56RqiiA7sWDwCaLQ
SPEAKER BIOS
Sophie Jones is Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Liverpool. Her research focuses upon the socio-cultural development of the North American colonies, in particular the origins of political loyalism and the activities of loyalists during the American Revolution. Her most recent article explores variations of loyalism in the colony of New York, while her first monograph project considers the role of print culture and urban spaces in shaping political sentiment.
Laura Miller is Professor of English at the University of West Georgia. She studies the intersections of literature, media, and science during the eighteenth century. Her first book, Reading Popular Newtonianism: Print, the Principia, and the Dissemination of Newtonian Science, was published by the University of Virginia Press in 2018. Dr. Miller has held fellowships at the Houghton Library at Harvard University, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. She is currently working on a book which focuses on the connections between readership, scientific experimentation, and conceptions of early American government as experimental, as well as other projects related to library history, science, the digital humanities, and gender.
Norbert Schürer is Professor of English at California State University Long Beach. His research focuses on literature and book history in the long eighteenth century (c. 1660-1832). More specifically, he works on eighteenth-century women writers, circulating libraries, and the Anglo-Indian encounter. He has published the anthology British Encounters with India (with Tim Keirn, 2011), the collection Charlotte Lennox: Correspondence and Miscellaneous Documents (2012), the cultural guide Berlin (2014), and the local history study Boom and Bust: Miner Smith and His 1920s California Bungalow Mansions (2015).
Matthew Sangster is Professor of Romantic Studies, Fantasy and Cultural History at the University of Glasgow. In the field of Library Studies, he has published on the eighteenth-century records of St Andrews University Library in the Review of English Studies and led the Carnegie-funded ‘Enlightenment Readers in the Scottish Universities’ project (focusing on Glasgow). He is a co-investigator of the ‘Books and Borrowing 1750-1830: An Analysis of Scottish Borrowers’ Registers’ project out of the University of Stirling. His other research interests include the Royal Literary Fund, Fantasy literature, Romantic-period London, literary institutions and the media environment of the 1820s. His first monograph, Living as an Author in the Romantic Period, was published by Palgrave in January 2021.
Contact Information
Lauren Lemley, Communications Manager
Congregational Library & Archives
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.
For more information, please email info@14beacon.org.
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Raymond Pun
Academic and Research Librarian
Alder Graduate School of Education
He/Him/His
https://www.raypun.info/
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