Dr Catherine Feely

Teaching Associate in Modern British History

Office Hours: Spring 2012-13 - Mondays 3-4pm; Wednesdays 12-1pm, in room 1.06

Outside of these hours Catherine is based in room 3.01

c.feely@sheffield.ac.uk

+44 (0)114 222 2578
 

Jessop West 3.01

Major Publications

Biography

Catherine’s interests lie broadly in the field of modern British cultural history from 1800 to the mid twentieth century, with a particular concentration on the history of reading, writing and publishing. Her PhD, titled 'Karl Marx, Capital and radical book cultures in Britain, 1881-1945', was awarded by the University of Manchester in 2011, where she also completed an MA in Cultural History and a BA (Hons) in Politics and Modern History. Since finishing her PhD, she has taught various courses on nineteenth and twentieth century British and European history at the universities of Manchester, Durham and Sheffield.

Membership of Professional Bodies

Committee member of History Lab Plus, the Institute for Historical Research’s network for early career historians (Events Co-ordinator, North).

Active member of the Social History Society, the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing and the Book History Research Network.

Research

Karl Marx’s Capital and Radical Book Cultures in Modern Britain

Despite the fact that arguments concerning 'what Marx really meant' or 'what Marx really said' have raged ever since his death in 1883, the popular diffusion of his ideas is surprisingly under-researched. The history of the publication and reception of Marx's Capital in Britain highlights competing and changing attitudes towards the role of intellectual study within radical politics. A wide range of sources, including publishers' archives, letters, diaries, the socialist press, marginalia and surviving libraries, are material relics of vibrant book cultures. Focusing on the circulation of the book as a material object and commodity, this research poses new questions about the diffusion of Marx's work. It asks how Marxists - and Marx himself - came to consider their production, distribution and consumption of books as a form of political practice. The exploration of these issues not only sheds new light on the nature of British Marxism but contributes to wider historical debates about reading, consumerism and forms of political engagement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Catherine is currently turning this research into a monograph, provisionally titled The Circulation of Capital: Publishing and Reading Karl Marx in Britain.

Wider research interests include the following:

The place of literature and the printed word in radical social and political movements; the relationship between book history, intellectual history and material culture studies; the history of reading and writing, particularly in relation to self-fashioning and everyday life; working-class writing, particularly diaries; the publication of psychology in Britain and the general use of psychological theory by radical political groups; popular journalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Selected Publications

Single authored peer review article

‘From Dialectics to Dancing: Reading, Writing and the Experience of Everyday Life in the Diaries of Frank P. Forster.’ History Workshop Journal,69, Spring 2010, pp. 90-110.

Edited Collection

Catherine Feely, Kathryn Green and Matthew Yeo, eds., ‘Making Meaning From Material: New Histories of the Book’ (special guest-edited dossier of six articles), European Review of History/Revue europèenne d’Histoire, 17:2, April 2010.

Book contribution

‘Only a “Scrap of Paper”: the Prison Reading of British Conscientious Objectors, 1916-1919’ in Edmund King and Shafquat Towheed, eds., Reading and the First World War, Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2014.