James Russell Raven LittD FBA
FSA (born 13 April 1959) is a British scholar specializing in the
history of the book
The history of books became an acknowledged academic discipline in the 1980s. Contributors to the discipline include specialists from the fields of textual scholarship, codicology, bibliography, philology, palaeography, art history, social hi ...
. His published works include ''The English Novel 1770-1829'' (2000)'', The Business of Books'' (2007), and ''What is the History of the Book?'' (2018)''.'' As of 2019, he was Professor Emeritus of history at the University of Essex.
Biography
Born in
Colchester, James Raven attended
The Gilberd School
The Gilberd School is a coeducational secondary school with academy status, in Colchester, Essex, England.
History
The school originally opened on 12 July 1912 in buildings on North Hill, Colchester. During the 1930s the school became known a ...
in the town. He was the first in his family to go to university. He read History at
Clare College, Cambridge, where he also completed his doctorate on attitudes to wealth creation.
In 1985 he became a
Fellow of
Pembroke College, Cambridge
Pembroke College (officially "The Master, Fellows and Scholars of the College or Hall of Valence-Mary") is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England. The college is the third-oldest college of the university and has over 700 ...
and, in 1989, also Munby Fellow in Bibliography in the University.
In 1990, he moved to
Magdalene College, Cambridge
Magdalene College ( ) is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college was founded in 1428 as a Benedictine hostel, in time coming to be known as Buckingham College, before being refounded in 1542 as the College of St Mary ...
to be a Fellow and Director of Studies in History. In 1996 he was appointed University Lecturer in the Modern History faculty at the
University of Oxford and a Fellow and Tutor of
Mansfield College, Oxford. In 2000, he was appointed Reader in Social and Cultural History at Oxford.
In 2004, he returned to his home town of Colchester when appointed Professor of Modern History at the
University of Essex. He was elected a Fellow of the
Royal Historical Society in 2000, a Fellow of the
Society of Antiquaries in 2007, and a Fellow of the Linnean Society in 2014.
He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2019.
He has been a visiting fellow at several American universities and institutions including
Rutgers University,
The American Antiquarian Society and
The Newberry Library,
Chicago. He was a Fellow, successively of Pembroke College and Magdalene College Cambridge, and from 1996 a Fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford and Reader in Social and Cultural History at Oxford from 2000. In 2004 he was appointed Professor of Modern History at the University of Essex, returning to his home town. He was President of the
Bibliographical Society
Founded in 1892, The Bibliographical Society is the senior learned society dealing with the study of the book and its history in the United Kingdom.
Largely owing to the efforts of Walter Arthur Copinger, who was supported by Richard Copley ...
(2020–2022) and is currently Director of the Cambridge Project for the Book Trust, and Director of the Centre for Bibliographical History and a member of the Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex.
Raven has directed several major national and international research projects, including two projects sponsored by the
Leverhulme Trust, 1991-2 in eighteenth-century European social history, and 1995-8, an international historical survey of publication and its reception in
Great Britain 1770-1830. A further institutional award from the AHRB/British Academy 1996-2004, funded the centre at the University of Oxford researching aspects of the literary, commercial, and political topography of
London circa 1690-1800 (‘Mapping the Print Culture of Eighteenth-Century London').
In 1976 Raven joined the
English-Speaking Union
The English-Speaking Union (ESU) is an international educational membership organistation. Founded by the journalist Sir Evelyn Wrench in 1918, it aims to bring together and empower people of different languages and cultures, by building skill ...
and has been President of the Colchester Branch of the ESU since 1990 and serves as a national Governor (2000-6 and 2012-), Deputy Chairman, and since 2019, Chairman in succession to Lord Paul Boateng. He also chairs the Lindemann Trust which awards annual Fellowships in the sciences for postdoctoral research in the US by British and Commonwealth citizens.
Between 2010 and 2020 he served as a Trustee of Marks Hall, Essex,
and the Friends of St Andrews' Fingringhoe. He is a member of the Pilgrims and the Mid-Atlantic Club.
He is the author, among other books, of ''What is the History of the Book?'', ''Publishing Business'', ''Bookscape'', ''The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450-1850'' and ''Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce in England, 1750-1800''. He is also Director of the
Cambridge Project for the Book Trust
Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...
(founded 1990)
and a well-known writer and broadcaster on cultural and social history.
11/07/2004
James Raven - The Lost Libraries
Selected published works
* ''Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce in England, 1750-1800'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992)
* ''The Practice and Representation of Reading in England'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), with Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor (eds.)
* (ed.) ''Free Print and Non-Commercial Publishing'' (London and Vermont: Ashgate Press, 2000)
* ''The English Novel 1770-1829'': ''A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles'', 2 vols.(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), with Peter Garside and Rainer Schöwerling)
* ''London Booksellers and American Customers: Transatlantic Literary Community and the Charleston Library Society, 1748-1811'' (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2002)
* (ed.)''Lost Libraries: The Destruction of Book Collections Since Antiquity'' (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
*''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
*''Publishing Business in Eighteenth-Century England'' (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2014)
*
See also
* Book trade in the United Kingdom
* Books in the United Kingdom
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Raven, James
1959 births
Living people
Fellows of Pembroke College, Cambridge
Academics of the University of Essex
Fellows of the British Academy
British historians
Alumni of Clare College, Cambridge
People from Colchester
Fellows of Magdalene College, Cambridge
Fellows of Mansfield College, Oxford