Dr Matthew Symonds
Senior Research Fellow
Centre for Editing Lives and Letters
Faculty of Arts & Humanities
- Joined UCL
- 1st Sep 2012
Research summary
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.
Teaching summary
Dr Symonds currently supervises one PhD student.
He teaches two courses on the MA in Early Modern Studies: "Information culture in early modern Europe" and "From Archive to Hard Drive".
He has also taught courses on early modern news culture, as well as survey courses on the "long eighteenth century" and categories and concepts for early modern studies.
Education
- University College London
- Doctorate, Doctor of Philosophy | 2007
- University of Cambridge
- Other higher degree, Master of Philosophy | 2001
- University College London
- First Degree, Bachelor of Arts (Honours) | 2000