James Raven

About:

Biography

James Raven is Professor in Modern History. He 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 College, Cambridge, and Munby Fellow and Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and a member of the American Antiquarian Society, he has also held various visiting appointments in the United States, France, Italy and Britain.

For many years he has worked for several educational charities, including the English-Speaking Union of the Commonwealth (a member for 30 years, Governor 2000-6, and President of the Colchester branch since 1990). He is a Trustee of the Marks Hall Estate, Essex, Director of the Cambridge Project for the Book Trust (research and publications on www.cambridgebook.demon.co.uk) and Director of the Mapping the Print Culture of Eighteenth-Century London project. 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 and in 2010 he gave the 25th annual Panizzi lectures at the British Library, London, (named in honour of the great nineteenth-century architect of the British Museum) on London Booksites: Places of Printing and Publication before 1800’ with lectures on ‘Antient Shops and Conversible Men’, ‘Versatility and the Gloomy Stores of Literature’, and ‘Industry, Fashion, and Pettifogging Drivellers’. View the slides and listen to the podcasts on the British Library website.

Research interests

The author of numerous books and articles in early modern and modern history, his most recent book is The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450-1850 published by Yale University Press in 2007. Earlier publications examine approaches to media and literary history, the history of the organisation of knowledge, historical bibliography, and colonial cultural history. He has also published on specific aspects of urban, business and popular and intellectual history. As part of a major long-term project re-examining the social history of the Enlightenment in Britain and Europe, he has recently completed a book on reading and commercialisation, and is currently engaged in a history of gambling and the state lottery, and a cultural history of the Enlightenment.