Major research award for Hertford English fellow Emma Smith

13 January 2026

Professor Emma Smith has been awarded a three-year Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust.

The Leverhulme Trust funds ambitious blue skies research and scholarship with the potential to generate new ideas and research breakthroughs that benefit society. In this latest grants round, 27 Major Research Fellowships have been awarded to well-established, distinguished researchers in the humanities and social sciences to complete a piece of original research.

Emma is Hertford’s Fellow Librarian and Archivist, the University of Oxford’s Professor of Shakespeare Studies and an internationally renowned Shakespeare scholar. Her research focuses on Shakespeare, early modern drama and book history, combining academic publication with writing for a general audience. In this new project, Emma will be exploring ‘Imperial bibliography: books, race and value’. She writes:

‘In 1766, the wealthy merchant Richard Oswald commissioned a strikingly simple library plate for his new library at Auchincruive in Ayr. Those books are now spread globally across scores of rare book libraries. At the same time, he commissioned a different technology to mark his property: his initials on a slave-branding iron. My project investigates the conceptual overlaps between these two forms of ownership, and their ongoing implications for book history. I show how slave-wealth, yes, but more importantly, newly-racialised taxonomies of value, set the coordinates for book collecting, bibliography, and editorial work lasting right up to the present day.’

We congratulate Emma on this prestigious award and look forward to seeing the fruits of her research in due course!