Leah Price

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Leah Price is a professor of English at Harvard University, where she teaches the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novel and codirects an interdisciplinary seminar on the history of the book.

At Radcliffe, she will work on two book projects. In “The Stenographic Imagination,” she reads nineteenth-century British literature in the context of new ways of organizing, storing, and retrieving information, arguing that modern ideas about authorship and reading were powerfully shaped by mundane changes in recording technologies and vocational practices. In the other project, “Reader’s Block: The Uses of Books in Victorian Culture,” she explores how the realist novel conceptualized the relation of material objects (such as books) to cultural practices (such as reading).

Price earned her AB from Harvard College and her PhD from Yale University. She is supported in 2006–2007 by a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship as well as a Radcliffe fellowship. She is the author of The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel: From Richardson to George Eliot (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and a coeditor of both Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture (Ashgate, 2005) and a special issue of PMLA, “The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature” (January 2006). She writes about literature and cultural history for the London Review of Books.