Dr Mark Curran
From June 2007 to September 2011, Dr Mark Curran was a Research Fellow in the School of History at Leeds working on the French Book Trade project, having accompanied Simon Burrows on the pilot project in 2006. He specialises in print culture and is especially interested in the margins of the Enlightenment – from the radical atheism of d'Holbach to the extent that Enlightenment can be detected in devotional tracts and educational primers. When in Neuchâtel, he spent his days recording the purchases and sales of around one million volumes over a 20 year period. He was appointed to the Munby Fellow in bibliography at Cambridge for 2011-2012 to work on further projects on the book trade, and has been appointed as a temporary lecturer at Queen Mary's University of London from 2012-2015. Mark's activities can be followed on his blog.
Publications:
- ‘Mettons toujours Londres: enlightened Christianity and the public in pre-revolutionary francophone Europe’, French History (2010) 24 (1): 40-59. Winner of the French History Article Prize 2011. Available here: http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/french/prize.html.
- ‘The Société typographique de Neuchâtel and networks of trade and translation in eighteenth-century francophone Europe’, in Ann Thomson, Simon Burrows and Edmond Dziembowski, eds, Cultural Transfers: France and Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2010).
Accepted and contracted publications:
- Atheism, Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth Century France, single-authored monograph, extensively re-written from his acclaimed doctoral thesis. To be published in the Royal Historical Society ‘Studies in History’ series in early 2012 (ISBN 978-0861933167).
- Selling Enlightenment, single-authored monograph, currently in preparation for Continuum press, to be published late 2012. This book is his principal output from the ‘French Book Trade’ project. The product of four years of archival research, it radically revaluates the eighteenth-century European book trade in the light of the STNs sales figures, which are revealed for the first time (ISBN: 9781441178909).
Forthcoming publications:
- 'Beyond the Forbidden Best-Sellers of pre-Revolutionary France’, article, revises our understanding of the illegal books circulating in pre-Revolutionary France. His principal article output from the ‘French Book Trade’ project, The Historical Journal.
