Leah Price

Leah Price is Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English at Harvard University, where she teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, gender, fiction, and the history of books. She is the author of two prizewinning books, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain and The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel, and editor of Unpacking my Library: Writers and their Books. She writes on old and new media for the New York Times, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, San Francisco Chronicle, and Boston Globe. The New York Times recently profiled her experiment learning side by side with her students to inscribe clay tablets, make a quill pen, read by candlelight, chisel a tombstone and hunt and peck on carbon paper; “Book Sleuthing: The Nineteenth Century” builds on that course as well as on an exhibit on the history of notetaking that she curated with Ann Blair and Greg Afinogenov. She is at work on a new book, People of the Book: How Understanding the Printed Past Can Transform Our Digital Future.