Photo by by Tony Rinaldo

Director of the humanities program, Academic Ventures at the Radcliffe Institute and professor of English in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Through her research and teaching, Leah Price probes the form of the novel, as well as the history and future of reading. Price is a professor of English at Harvard University, where she teaches 18th and 19th century culture, narrative theory, gender, and the history of reading. She co-directs the seminar on the history of the book at the Mahindra Center for the Humanities at Harvard. In 2010, she organized—together with Ann Blair, senior advisor to the humanities program—the Institute’s conference “Why Books?” The conference brought together speakers from a variety of disciplines to explore the form and function of the book in a rapidly changing media ecology.

Price's books include The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (2000) and (coedited with Pamela Thurschwell) Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture; she has also edited (with Seth Lerer) a special issue of PMLA on The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature. She writes on old and new media for the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, and the Boston Globe. Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books (Yale University Press) was published in November 2011. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain is forthcoming from Princeton in 2012. 

Price’s research has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Stanford University, and Girton College Cambridge. In 2006, Price was awarded a chair endowed in recognition of exceptional graduate and undergraduate teaching.