Kelsey Williams

(MENAFN- The Conversation)

• Associate Professor of English, University of Stirling

Profile Articles

Kelsey Jackson Williams is Associate Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Stirling and Senior Research Fellow at Blackie House Library and Museum in Edinburgh. His newest book, Portrait of an Obsession: How England's Greatest Private Library was Built from the Ruins of Europe's Monasteries, will be published by Oxford University Press this October.

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I study the history of the book, mostly in early modernity and often in Scotland. My latest monograph – 'Some bonie litle bookes': A History and Catalogue of the Lindsay Library, 1570-1792 (co-authored with William Zachs) – is now available from Brill and I'm currently working on two new projects: Bibliomania: Portrait of an Obsession (under contract with Oxford University Press), a study of the remarkable book-collecting career of the 2nd Earl Spencer, and Thomas Frognall Dibdin's 1836 Scottish Tour Revisited (co-authored with William Zachs; under contract with the Roxburghe Club), an examination and amplification of one of the seminal moments in nineteenth-century Scottish book history.

Of my previous books, The First Scottish Enlightenment: Rebels, Priest, and History (Oxford University Press, 2020) is a substantial reassessment of the Scottish Early Enlightenment and my first monograph – The Antiquary: John Aubrey's Historical Scholarship (Oxford University Press, 2016) – was a study of the working methods of one of seventeenth-century Britain's most innovative scholars. In between, I wrote the main commentary for and co-edited Aubrey's Villa: An Edition of Bodleian MS Aubrey 17, Designatio de Easton-Piers in Com: Wilts (Old School Press, 2018).

In addition to these larger projects, I've also published or spoken on numerous aspects of early modern Scottish culture, Latin, Scots, and Gaelic poetry, the history of books, book collecting, and reading, canon and disciplinary formation, epigraphy and carved stones, Scandinavian state-sponsored antiquarianism, and early modern understandings of the ancient past.

I am also the director of the Pathfoot Press, the University of Stirling's centre for letterpress learning and teaching. There I print – mostly Scots writing, ancient and modern – teach and talk to people about what letterpress is and why it matters more than ever in a digital age.

In addition, I serve as publications secretary of the Scottish History Society, established in 1886 and currently one of the oldest publication societies in Great Britain. In that capacity, I would be delighted to hear from anyone interested in publishing editions of primary texts from Scotland's past.

Experience

• –present Associate Professor of English, University of Stirling

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