Congratulations to Professor Emma Smith who has been awarded a three-year Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust for her project: ‘Imperial bibliography: books, race and value’.
The Leverhulme Trust is an independent charity that seeks to fund blue skies research and scholarship which has the potential to generate new ideas and research breakthroughs that benefit society. The Major Research Fellowships are awarded to well-established, distinguished researchers in the humanities and social sciences to complete a piece of original research.
More about Professor Smith's project
In 1766, the wealthy merchant Richard Oswald commissioned a strikingly simple library plate for his new library at Auchincruive in Ayr. Those books are now spread globally across scores of rare book libraries. At the same time, he commissioned a different technology to mark his property: his initials on a slave-branding iron. My project investigates the conceptual overlaps between these two forms of ownership, and their ongoing implications for book history. I show how slave-wealth, yes, but more importantly, newly-racialised taxonomies of value, set the coordinates for book collecting, bibliography, and editorial work lasting right up to the present day.
See the full list of Major Research Fellowships awards on the Leverhulme website.
