Contributors

With a core team of researchers based at UCL’s Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, the project has benefitted immeasurably from the knowledge and support of colleagues at the Bodleian Library.

Team members

Dr Robyn Adams (Primary Investigator, CELL)

Robyn Adams is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at UCL. She is Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded project ‘Shaping Scholarship: Early Donations to the Bodleian Library’ on which the resource Early Bodleian Donations Online is based, in collaboration with the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Her research focuses on manuscript and book history. She has published on letter collections and donations to the Bodleian Library.

Dr Matthew Symonds (Co-Investigator, CELL)

Matthew Symonds is a Senior Research Fellow at UCL and CELL’s Technical Research Officer, responsible for the software architecture of the various CELL projects. He is Co-I on CELL’s major research project, Shaping Scholarship, funded by the AHRC, and was Co-PI on The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Dr Alexandra Franklin (Co-Investigator, Bodleian Library)

Alexandra Franklin is Co-ordinator of the Bodleian Libraries Centre for the Study of the Book. As a rare books librarian she helped to create the Bodleian Broadside Ballads online resource, compiling a subject index of the woodcut illustrations on ballad sheets. She has published articles on the illustration of ballads and continues to research popular reading and printed imagery while managing educational and fellowship programmes within the Bodleian’s Department of Special Collections.

Dr Anna-Lujz Gilbert (Post-Doctoral Research Associate, CELL)

Anna-Lujz Gilbert is the postdoctoral researcher on the Shaping Scholarship project. In that capacity, she has designed the project database, overseen the data collection and cleaning, and carried out a material survey of donated books in the Bodleian Library. Her wider interests are in the public or semi-public libraries of early modern England. In particular, she is interested in what the movement to found these libraries can tell us about how books were valued. She carried out her PhD on the town and parish libraries of early modern Devon, which provide rare evidence of local book cultures amongst the middling sorts.

Ben Wilkinson-Turnbull (Research Associate, CELL)

Ben Wilkinson-Turnbull is a doctoral candidate, Clarendon, and Graduate Development Scholar in English at the University of Oxford. His doctoral research focuses on women’s writing and book history between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. His work has appeared in The Review of English Studies and Women’s Writing. He is also co-editor of Philosophical and Physical Opinions for The Complete Works of Margaret Cavendish, contributing editor to The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift, and co-editor of the material book section of The Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing. Ben has worked as a Research Assistant on several projects, including “Opening the Edgeworth Papers” and The Oxford Traherne. He has also interned for Elizabeth Montagu Correspondence Online. Ben has taught widely on literature written between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries and is also a practicing poet. They are a proud working class, northern, disabled, and queer first generation academic.

Katie Hannawin (Senior Library Assistant, Rare Books, Bodleian Library)

Katie Hannawin is a Senior Library Assistant in Rare Books at the Bodleian Library, in a fixed-term post created partly to support the Shaping Scholarship project. She is responsible for adding the data gathered during the project to the Bodleian Library Catalogue (SOLO), to make it searchable and accessible to researchers using the catalogue. She has an MA in Library and Information Studies from UCL, where her dissertation focused on the representation of marginalised groups in library metadata. Her wider interests also include rare books and special collections librarianship, book history, information literacy, and knowledge organisation.

Acknowledgements

Rahel Fronda is Hebrew and Judaica Deputy Curator at the Bodleian Library and Hebrew Antiquarian Cataloguer at Christ Church, Oxford. For the project, she identified early Hebrew donations from the Benefactors’ Register.

Matthew Holford is Tolkien Curator of Medieval Manuscripts at the Bodleian Libraries and assisted with the export of relevant data from the online catalogue of Medieval Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries.

Colin Harris Hon. MA (Oxon), Rare Books volunteer in the Bodleian Library Special Collections, shared the data from his in-progress surveys of quarto series books and his expertise in the history and provenance of the collections.