Dr Matthew Symonds

Office Hour: Fridays, 2pm–4pm, B.08 18 Gordon Square

Matthew Symonds is an historian specialising in the history of the book in early modern Europe and the use of the digital humanities within traditional scholarly research. 

He is Co-PI on CELL’s major research project, The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe, in collaboration with Johns Hopkins and Princeton universities. He supervises a team of researchers transcribing and analysing the manuscript annotations in a collection of books once owned by Elizabethan man of parts Gabriel Harvey and the polymath John Dee. 

He studied history at UCL and Cambridge. His Ph.D., ‘Grub street culture: the newspapers of Nathaniel Mist c.1715 – c. 1745’, is about a Jacobite, his newspaper, and the repeated scandalous and seditious libels that it published. 

He is currently writing about translation and cultural identity in exile communities, specifically the Huguenot community in early modern London.