I’m Associate Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Stirling, Senior Research Fellow at Blackie House Library and Museum, and 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), 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 book history, early modern Scottish culture, Latin, Scots, and Gaelic poetry, book collecting, and reading, canon and disciplinary formation, epigraphy and carved stones, 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 general editor 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.
When not writing, teaching, or printing, I embarrass myself and those around me by rowing, folk singing, and stravaiging about the countryside in search of carved stones.
I’m always happy to hear from current or potential students! Just drop me a line at k.j.williams@stir.ac.uk.
Copyright © 2016-24 Kelsey Jackson Williams
Kelsey Jackson Williams 