Professor James Raven FBA
College positions: Life Fellow
University position: University Affiliated Lecturer in History
Subject: History
Group membership: Director, Cambridge Project for the Book Trust
Professor James Raven is a Life Fellow of Magdalene College.
He is a member of the History and English faculties, Professor in the Humanities at NTNU, Trondheim, Norway, and Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the University of Essex. He is currently President of the Bibliographical Society and Director of the Cambridge Project for the Book Trust and was formerly Reader in Social and Cultural History at the University of Oxford, and Professorial Fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford; Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Magdalene, and Munby Fellow, University of Cambridge. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, Fellow of the Linnean Society, and a member of the American Antiquarian Society, he has also held various visiting appointments in the United States, France, Italy and Britain. His publications in social and cultural history and cultural studies were recognized with the award of LittD from Cambridge in 2012 and he was elected to the British Academy in 2019.
For many years Professor Raven has worked at senior level for several international and national educational charities, with particular interest in educational access and widening participation, including the English-Speaking Union of the Commonwealth of which he is now Chairman. He is Chair of the Lindemann Trust for UK postdoctoral awards for scientific study in the US; and is Patron and Trustee Emeritus of the Marks Hall Estate, Essex. He is a regular reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement, and an occasional contributor to radio and television programmes.
James Raven gave the 2008 Karmiole Lecture in Los Angeles, in 2010 the 25th annual Panizzi lectures at the British Library, London, and in 2016, the 5th Annual J. R. de J. Jackson Lecture, Toronto.
Research Interests
- British, European and colonial social and cultural history since c. 1500.
Research Supervision
Seventeenth-, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century cultural history, with particular interests in:
- Historical, Communications and Cultural Studies after 1500;
- The history of representations, emotion, humour and cross-cultural relations;
- Hospitality and immigrant and foreign language communities;
- Translation and language learning;
- The cultural history of loss and the relationship between any of the following: material culture, spatial aspects of memory, communications networks, the past in relation to social media and the language of space.
Qualifications
- MA PhD (Cantab)
- MA (Oxon)
- LittD (Cantab)
Professional Affiliations
- Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
- Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries
- Vice-President (and President-elect), Bibliographical Society
- Fellow of the Linnean Society
- Fellow of the British Academy
- President of the Bibliographical Society
- Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals
- Academic and Research Libraries Group
- Rare Books and Special Collections Group
- Director, SHARP
- Associate, Projekt Fürstliche Bibliothek Corvey Paderborn, Germany
- American Antiquarian Society
Inventing the term 'Bookscape'
Memory and the Marks Hall Mansion
What is the History of the Book?
KEY PUBLICATIONS
Global Exchanges of Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century c. 1650–1850. James Raven. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2024.
The Oxford History of the Book. James Raven. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023; Chinese edition 2024.
The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book. James Raven. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020; paperback edition 2022.
On the book world of 18th-century London and Bishop Pontoppidan’s sea monsters. James Raven. British Academy Review, December 2019.
What is the History of the Book?. James Raven. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018; translated editions: Turkish 2022, Vietnamese 2022, Chinese 2023, Spanish 2024.
Lost Mansions: Essays on the Destruction of the Country House (ed.). James Raven. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Publishing Business in Eighteenth-Century England. James Raven. Boydell, 2014.
Bookscape: Geographies of Printing and Publishing in London before 1800 [the Panizzi Lectures 2010]. James Raven. Chicago and The British Library, 2014.
Books between Europe and the Americas: Transatlantic Literary Communities 1620–1860 (ed., with Leslie Howsam). James Raven. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450–1850. James Raven. London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Awarded the De Long Prize for 2008.
Lost Libraries: The Destruction of Book Collections since Antiquity (ed.). James Raven. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
London Booksellers and American Customers: Transatlantic Literary Community and the Charleston Library Society, 1748–1811. James Raven. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2002.
The English Novel 1770–1829, 2 vols. James Raven, with Peter Garside and Rainer Schöwerling. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Free Print and Non-Commercial Publishing since 1700 (ed.). James Raven. London and Vermont: Ashgate Press, 2000.
The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (eds.). James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce in England, 1750–1800. James Raven. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.