Southampton Centre for Nineteenth-Century Research with Prof K Halsey

A bout this event

Round table with Professor Mary Hammond and Professor Katherine Halsey

Reading history in the long nineteenth century

The School of Humanities is pleased to invite you to "Celebrating the research of Professor Mary Hammond: Reading history in the long nineteenth century", which will take place on 12 June 2024 at 16.00hrs on the University of Southampton’s Avenue Campus, and on line.
We are delighted to welcome Professor Katherine Halsey (University of Stirling) to speak at this event in the Southampton Centre for Nineteenth-Century Research series.

A bout the speaker

Katie Halsey is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at the University of Stirling, and Co-Director of its Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Her publications include Jane Austen and her Readers, 1786-1945, The History of Reading: A Reader (co-edited with Rosalind Crone and Shafquat Towheed), The History of Reading: Evidence from the British Isles c. 1750-1950 (co-edited with W.R. Owens), Shakespeare and Authority (co-edited with Angus Vine) as well as numerous articles and book chapters. She is currently Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded research project Books and Borrowing 1750-1830: An Analysis of Scottish Borrowers’ Registers.

E vent Information

Guests can join this event in person at Avenue Campus, University of Southampton, or online. Please select your ticket choice when booking.

W e encourage guests who wish to join in person to register at your earliest opportunity as spaces are strictly limited.

If you have any questions about this event please contact fahevent@soton.ac.uk.

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Keynote speaker

Professor Katherine Halsey, University of Stirling

Readers and Dinosaurs: The History of Reading and its Fossil Traces

As Mary Hammond writes in her introduction to the volume on Early Readers in the four-volume Edinburgh History of Reading of 2020, ‘reading is always a deeply imbricated, political and social practice, at once personal and public; defiant and obedient; sometimes materially ephemeral, often emotionally and intellectually enduring’ (p.1). Knowledge about the reading publics of the past very often depends on the most ephemeral of materials, and in this paper I will discuss the problems and opportunities involved in finding, collating, and analysing material evidence for reading history in the long nineteenth century. Making use of a metaphorical similarity between palaeontologists and historians of reading, I will consider some of the material evidence with which I have most recently been working – historic library borrowing registers – and consider what kinds of structures of knowledge we might reconstruct from them.