Bill
Bell is Director of the Centre for the History
of the Book
at The University of Edinburgh where he teaches in the
School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures. He specialises
in Nineteenth Century literature and culture and has
written extensively on the sociology of the text, the
history of the book, and theories of cultural production.
He has held visiting posts at The Australian National
University, The University of Ottawa, and St John's
College, Oxford. He held a Visiting Professorship at
The University of Göttingen
in 2010-2011, where he will return to take up a fellowship
at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg between 2012-2013.
He was for
several years a member of the editorial team of the
Duke-Edinburgh edition of The Collected Letters
of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (vols 19-24) and
is general editor of the Edinburgh
History of the Book in Scotland, to be published
in 4 volumes by Edinburgh University Press, of which
he is also editor of volume 3, Industry and Ambition,
1800-1880. He is also Director of the Scottish
Book Trade Archive Inventory database and Co-investigator
on the AHRC-funded Correspondence
Project.
He is a member
of the Council of The Bibliographical Society, and has
been a Board member of the Research Society for Victorian
Periodicals (RSVP) and the Society for the History of
Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP). He is on
the Editorial Board of Palgrave Studies in the History
of Media and on the advisory boards of several publications
including the American annual Book History.
He is currently completing a study of itinerant reading
communities, entitled Crusoe's Books: Journeys through
the Textual Imagination.
He is Editor
of The
Library: Transactions of the Bibliographical Society.
Selected Essays
[additional links to appear shortly]
'What
was the History of the Book?'
‘English
Studies and the Trouble with History'
‘The
Function of Arnold at the Present Time'
‘Print
Culture in Exile: The Scottish Emigrant Reader''
‘Pioneers
of Literature: The Publisher's Traveller in the Nineteenth
Century'
‘Bound
for Australia : Shipboard Reading in the Nineteenth
Century'
‘Beyond
the Death of the Author'
‘From
Grub Street to Parnassus : Matthew Arnold and the House
of Macmillan'
‘Bound for
Botany Bay ; Or, What did the Nineteenth Century Convict
Read?'
'George
Murray Smith' (publisher and founder of the DNB)
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