Professor James Raven FBA

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.

• MA PhD (Cantab)
• MA (Oxon)
• LittD (Cantab)

National

2000 Fellow of the Royal Historical Society

2008 Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries

2012 Vice-President (and President-elect), Bibliographical Society

2016 Fellow of the Linnean Society

2019 Fellow of the British Academy

2020 President of the Bibliographical Society

Member, CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) and member, Academic and Research Libraries Group, and Rare Books and Special Collections Group

International

1991 Director, SHARP, 

1991 Associate, Projekt Fürstliche Bibliothek Corvey Paderborn, Germany

1997 American Antiquarian Society

Global Exchanges of Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century c. 1650-1850, (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2024)

The Oxford History of the Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023); Chinese edn 2024

The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); paperback edn 2022;

James Raven: Interview
On the book world of 18th-century London and Bishop Pontoppidan’s sea monsters. (British Academy Review December 2019)

What is the History of the Book? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018) and translated edns, Turkish, 2022, Vietnamese 2022, Chinese 2023, and Spanish 2024

(ed.) Lost Mansions: Essays on the Destruction of the Country House (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)

Publishing Business in Eighteenth-Century England (Boydell, 2014)

Bookscape: Geographies of Printing and Publishing in London before 1800 [the Panizzi Lectures 2010] (Chicago and The British Library, 2014)

(ed.), Books between Europe and the Americas: Transatlantic Literary Communities 1620-1860 [with Leslie Howsam] (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)

The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450-1850 (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007) – awarded the De Long prize for 2008

(ed.) Lost Libraries: The Destruction of Book Collections since Antiquity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)

London Booksellers and American Customers: Transatlantic Literary Community and the Charleston Library Society, 1748-1811 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2002)

The English Novel 1770-1829 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), with Peter Garside and Rainer Schöwerling

(ed.) Free Print and Non-Commercial Publishing since 1700 (London and Vermont: Ashgate Press, 2000)

The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), with Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor (eds.)

Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce in England, 1750-1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992)