Project team and partners

Here you'll find details of the current project team, external co-investigators, previous team members, and our project partners.

Current team

• Mark Towsey (Principal Investigator), Professor in the History of Book and Head of the Department of History at the University of Liverpool
• Sophie Jones, Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century History at the University of Liverpool
• Lucy Moynihan, AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Student at the University of Liverpool (in partnership with the Liverpool Athenaeum), working on “Race, Slavery and Abolition at the Liverpool Athenaeum and Beyond” (2022-present)
• Lois Wignall, ESRC-funded CASE Doctoral Student at the University of Liverpool (in partnership with the Liverpool Athenaeum), working on “The ‘Mechanically Literate Entrepreneur’ Reconsidered: Subscription Libraries and the Industrial Revolution” (2023-present).

External Co-Investigators

• Simon Burrows, Western Sydney University
• Rachel Hendery, formerly of Western Sydney University
• Robert Mailhammer, Western Sydney University
• Laura Miller, University of West Georgia
• Kyle B. Roberts, formerly of Loyola University Chicago and the American Philosophical Society; now of Congregational Library and Archives
• Matthew Sangster, University of Glasgow
• Norbert Schürer, California State University (Long Beach)
• Lynda Yankaskas, Muhlenberg College.

Previous team members

• Joshua Smith, HEIF-funded Pre-doctoral Research Associate 2024
• Rita Dashwood, MHRA-funded Postdoctoral Research Associate 2023-24
• Max Skjönsberg, AHRC-funded Postdoctoral Research Associate 2019-22
• Angie Sutton-Vane, AHRC-funded Project Manager 2019-22.

We are grateful to have had the opportunity to work with a wide range of highly talented student interns, some of whom have later gone on to join the team in a formal capacity or undertake related doctoral research at other institutions. These include: Ali Dodds, Elle Donnelly, Harriet Gray, Betty Giannini, Lucy Jones, Kay McGregor, Lucy Moynihan, Emily Parkes, Anna Probert, James Smart, Eloise Smith, Julian Walker and Lois Wignall.

Project partners

Originally spanning the period October 2019 to September 2022, this project took shape amidst the global turmoil caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. This proved to be an especially challenging time for libraries: many of the librarians who supported us at the application stage are no longer in their positions, and the future of libraries of all kinds has rarely looked more precarious than it does today, in part thanks to the socio-economic fallout from lockdown culture. We are tremendously grateful to our library partners for continuing to do what they could to support our work in the most challenging of circumstances, even though many of our collaborative plans – including face-to-face events! – had to be radically scaled back. We are especially grateful to Samina Ansari (at Birmingham) and Sophie Evans (at Bristol) for committing so much of their time to follow-on projects that have taken place since our original funding lapsed.

• Birmingham & Midland Institute
• Bristol Central Library
• Library Company of Burlington
• Library Company of Philadelphia
• Linen Hall, Belfast
• Liverpool Athenaeum
• Liverpool Central Library
• New York Society Library
• Union Library of Hatboro
• State Library of New South Wales.

The project has benefited immensely from formal partnerships and informal collegiality with the following:

• Katie Halsey and all of the Books and Borrowing 1750-1830: An Analysis of Scottish Borrowers’ Registers team at the University of Stirling
• Mikko Tolonen and the Computational History Group at the University of Helsinki
• Darshan Nagavara, Craig Hamilton and all of the team at Intersect Australia
• Ian Johnson, Michael Falk, Maël le Noc and all of the team at Heurist.