We’re delighted to announce that Professor Leah Price has been appointed to the Professorship of Bibliography and Modern Book History.
Professor Price has a BA from Harvard University and a PhD from Yale. Following a Junior Research Fellowship at Cambridge, she returned to Harvard as a tenured professor. In 2019 Leah was appointed Henry Rutgers Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University and founding director of the Rutgers Initiative for the Book. Her publications include The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (Cambridge, 2000); How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton, 2012) and What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading (Basic, 2019). Her current research project, Victorian Books and their Servants, which draws upon housekeeping manuals, library catalogues, missionary biographies and cheap fiction, was the subject of her 2025 Lyell Lectures.
Professor Price commented:
Oxford has always played an outsized role in thinking about what books can do that other media can't. I'm thrilled to join colleagues in the Faculty as well as the Libraries who are finding such creative ways to understand an evolving object. While I have a daunting amount to learn about what bookish activities are already underway, one project that I hope to undertake right away is a "manual humanities space" in which students and community members can make and repair books, to strengthen existing bridges between the Schwarzman Centre's new makerspace and the embarrassment of riches that is the Bodleian.
Professor Price will take up the post in Trinity term 2027.
