Career Details

Following a career as a librarian, John Hinks took early retirement in 1997 from the post of Director of Libraries, Leicestershire County Council, and embarked on doctoral research and some part-time teaching at Loughborough University. He already had a Master’s in Library Studies (Loughborough 1980) and an MA in Historical Studies (Leicester 1995), both obtained by part-time study. His thesis on the history of the book trade in Leicester to c.1850, supervised by Professor John Feather, resulted in the award of a PhD in 2002. He then became for three years a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of English, University of Birmingham, working with Dr Maureen Bell on the AHRC-funded ‘British Book Trade Index on the Web’ project.

On the completion of this project in 2005, he was appointed simultaneously to an Honorary Research Fellowship in the Department of English - where he continues to edit the British Book Trade Index website and also teaches on the MA: Text & Book - and an Honorary Fellowship at the Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester, where his current research is based.

Also, since 2005/6, a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Modern History at Birmingham, he has taught ‘Living and Writing in Shakespearean England’. He is a member of the Council of the Bibliographical Society and currently administers the society’s research grants scheme.

Current Research

Book trade communities and networks in English provincial towns.

This research, supported by a British Academy grant, is based at the Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester.

For more details, see www.le.ac.uk/ur/home/people/john_hinks.html

Past Research

Main areas of interest are the history of the book and print culture, especially in early modern England, although I always emphasise that these need to be studied in a broader context, especially that of cultural history. My interests have tended to move backwards, chronologically speaking, and my earlier work on the production and distribution of radical political texts (c.1780s-1850, especially the Chartist press) has given way to research into the English provincial book trade, especially in the long eighteenth century and, more recently, to early modern print culture. I have a particular interest in the print culture of English Renaissance Humanism and the Reformation and its legacy and have done some preliminary research on the ‘underground’ distribution of recusant literature in England in the early seventeenth century.

Teaching

Module co-ordinator: ‘Living and writing in Shakespeare's England’

Postgraduate Supervision

I am happy to supervise research on most aspects of the cultural history of early modern England, especially urban culture, print culture, performance culture (informal and popular performance as well as those in theatres or at court) or a combination of these. For British book trade topics I can supervise early modern and long eighteenth century. Recent and current dissertations under my supervision include: early modern household manuals, the regulation of the early modern English book trade, the Bible translator William Tyndale and his printers, gender in early modern English jest books, and performance culture at the court of Elizabeth I.

Select Publications

‘Some Radical Printers and Booksellers of Leicester: c1790-1850’  in The Mighty Engine: the Printing Press and its Impact, edited by P Isaac and B McKay.
(St Paul’s Bibliographies and Oak Knoll Press, 2000), pp. 175-184

Edited Aspects of Leicester, (Barnsley, Wharncliffe Books, 2000) and wrote of one of its chapters: ‘Thomas Cooper and Leicester’s Chartist Press’.

‘The Beginnings of the Book Trade in Leicester’ in The Moving Market: Continuity and Change in the Book Trade, edited by P Isaac and B McKay. (Oak Knoll Press, 2001), pp.27-38. 

‘Freedom and Apprenticeship Records as a Source for Book Trade History’ Book Trade History Group Newsletter, no 41 (December 2001), pp. 11-13.

 ‘Local and Regional Studies of Printing History: context and content’ Journal of the Printing Historical Society, NS no. 5, (Spring 2003), pp. 3-15.

‘The British Book Trade Index’, Computers in Genealogy, vol. 8, no. 4 (Dec 2003), pp. 165-167

‘John Gregory and the Leicester Journal’ in Light on the Book Trade: Essays in Honour of Peter Isaac, edited by B McKay, J Hinks and M Bell. (British Library and Oak Knoll Press, 2004).

Co-edited with Catherine Armstrong: Printing Places: Locations of Book Production and Distribution since 1500 (‘Print Networks’ series - British Library and Oak Knoll Press, 2005).

With Maureen Bell: 'The Book Trade in English Provincial Towns, 1700-1850: an evaluation of evidence from the British Book Trade Index', Publishing History,57 (2005), pp. 53-112.

Co-edited with Catherine Armstrong:
Worlds of Print: Diversity in the Book Trade (‘Print Networks’ series - British Library and Oak Knoll Press, 2006.)

‘The Coming of Printing to Leicester’, The Leicestershire Historian, no. 41 2006.

With Maureen Bell: 'The English Provincial Book Trade: Evidence from the British Book Trade Index', The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. V, ed. M Suarez and M Turner (CUP, forthcoming<</em>).

Eighteen entries on early modern printers for The Oxford Companion to the Book, ed. M Suarez and H Woudhuysen, (OUP, forthcoming).