Profile

David has a BA in English Literature from Columbia University (1986), and a PhD in English and History from the University of Edinburgh (1990). Prior to joining Dundee in February 2012, he was an archivist at the National Library of Scotland, a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, a lecturer and senior lecturer at Edinburgh Napier University and held various senior positions at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh.

His research and teaching interests include print culture, media history and journalism studies. He is co-director of the SAPPHIRE initiative (www.sapphire.ac.uk), dedicated to the study of Scottish print and publishing industries, which was awarded a Glenfiddich Living Scotland Award for its preservation and promotion of Scotland’s cultural heritage. Current, ongoing projects include a cultural history of guano, research into nineteenth-century social networks and Scottish print trade union skills mobility, and a collaborative initiative with academic partners in six countries on transnational print trade migration, identity and skills transfer between 1840 and 1914 (www.sapphire.ac.uk/printersonthemove.htm).

David is a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Library of Scotland, a Fellow of the English Association, a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts, editorial board member of Media History and the Victorian Periodicals Review, and editorial board member of the book series Literary Texts and the Popular Marketplace (Pickering and Chatto) and Book Practices and Textual Itineraries (Presse Universitaire de Nancy). He is co-editor of the book series Journalism Studies(Sage), as well as co-editor of the annual Journal of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society. He also serves as a member of the Arts and Humanities Peer Review College, and has undertaken grant application assessments for the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation and the Wellcome Trust.

Monographs & Edited books

Monographs

Finkelstein, David and Alistair McCleery (2012). An Introduction to Book History, 2nd revised edition. London: Routledge (168 pp.). ISBN 978-0-415-68806-2.

Edited books

McCleery, Alistair, David Finkelstein and Jennie Renton, eds. (2009) An Honest Trade: Booksellers and Bookselling in Scotland. Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers (153 pp.) ISBN 0-859-76673-X.

Finkelstein, David and Alistair McCleery, eds. (2007). Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, vol. 4: Professionalisation and Diversity, 1880-2000. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. (548 pp.) ISBN 0-748-61829-5.

Refereed Book Chapters

Finkelstein (in progress, forthcoming 2015) “Scottish Periodicals.” in Alexis Easley, Andrew King and John Morton, eds. Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing (6000 words commissioned)

Finkelstein (in progress, forthcoming 2014) “The Role of the Literary and Cultural Periodical.” In Martin Conboy and John Steel, eds., Routledge Companion to British Media History. London: Routledge (5,000 words commissioned)

Finkelstein and Claire Squires (forthcoming 2013) “Book Events and Literary Environments.” in A. Nash and C. Squires, eds., Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Vol. 7 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (4000 words commissioned).

Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (forthcoming 2013) “Publishing Infrastructures.” in A. Nash and C. Squires, eds., Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Vol. 7 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (20,000 words commissioned).

Finkelstein (2013) “Selling Blackwood’s Magazine, 1817-1834.” In Robert Morrison and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, eds. ‘An Unprecedented Phenomenon’: Romanticism and Blackwood’s Magazine. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (pp. 69-86)

Finkelstein (2012) “Publishing and the Materiality of the Book.” in Kate Flint, ed. The New Cambridge History of English Literature: The Victorian Period . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (pp. 15-33)

Finkelstein (2012). “Political Journalism: Antony Sampson and Seymour Hersh.”Journalism Practice 6.1: 138-142

Fleming, Linda, David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (2011) “In a Class of their Own: the autodidact impulse and working class readers in twentieth-century Scotland.” In K. Halsey, S. Towheed and R. Crone, eds., The History of Reading, vol. 2: The British Isles. London: Routledge. (pp. 189-204).

Finkelstein and Sydney Shep (2011), “Migration, Identity and Print Culture: Sir David Henry and the Kinleith Paper Mill.” Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies 4.1 (Autumn): 119-130. Also reproduced in The Quarterly: The Journal of the British Association of Paper Historians, 80 (October 2011): 1-6.

Finkelstein (2011) “Publishing.” in Peter Logan, ed. Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Novel. Oxford: Blackwell. (pp.  638-642)

Finkelstein (2009). “Scottish Book Publishing in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century.” in Kenneth Veitch, ed. Compendium of Scottish Ethnology, vol. 8: Transport and Communication in Scotland. Edinburgh: NMS and John Donald Publishers. (pp. 695-715).

Finkelstein (2008). “Book Circulation and Reader Responses in Colonial India.” in Mary Hammond and Robert Fraser, eds. Books Without Borders, Volume 2: Perspectives from South Asia. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. (pp.100-111).

Finkelstein (2007). “The Role of the Publisher, 1830-1880.” in Bill Bell, ed. Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, Vol. 3: Ambition and Industry, 1800-1880. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (pp. 96-106).

Finkelstein (2007). “The ‘Dangerous Third Martini’: Graham Greene, Libel and Literary Journalism in 1930s Britain.” in Richard Keeble and Sharon Wheeler, eds. The Journalistic Imagination. London: Routledge (pp. 87-100).

Finkelstein (2007). “The Globalisation of the Book 1800-1970.” in Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose, eds. Blackwell Companion to the History of the Book. Oxford: Blackwell (pp. 329-340).

Finkelstein (2007). “History of the Book, Authorship, Book Design and Publishing.” in Charles Bazerman, ed. Handbook of Writing Research: History, Society, School, Individual, Text. London and New York: Taylor and Francis (pp. 65-79). Essay collection presented with the international Conference on College Composition and Communication 2009 Outstanding Book Award.

Journal Articles (refereed)

Finkelstein and Sydney Shep (2011), “Migration, Identity and Print Culture: Sir David Henry and the Kinleith Paper Mill.” Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies 4.1 (Autumn): 119-130. Also reproduced in The Quarterly: The Journal of the British Association of Paper Historians, 80 (October 2011): 1-6.

Finkelstein (2012). “Political Journalism: Antony Sampson and Seymour Hersh.”Journalism Practice 6.1: 138-142

Finkelstein (2011). “Sports Broadcasters: Howard Cosell and Harry Carpenter.” Journalism Practice 5.2: 1-4.

Finkelstein (2010). “Radio Journalism: H.V. Kaltenborn and José Pardo Llada.” Journalism Practice 4.1: 114-118.

Finkelstein (2009). “Photojournalism: Arthur Fellig (Weegee) and Homai Vyarawalla.” Journalism Practice 3.1: 108-112.

Finkelstein (2009). “’Decent Company’: Conrad, Blackwood’s, and the Literary Marketplace.” Conradiana 41.1 (Spring): 29-47.

Bromage, Sarah, David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (2009). “Publishing, Oral History and the SAPPHIRE Archive.” Scottish Archives 15: 91-97.

Finkelstein (2008). “The Publication History of Ranjitsinhji’s The Jubilee Book of Cricket.” Journal of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society. 3: 38-48.

Finkelstein (2008). “Investigative Journalism: Elena Poniatowska and Anna Politkovskaya.” Journalism Practice 2.1: 129-133.

Finkelstein (2007). “Rupert Murdoch and Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe.” Journalism Practice 1.2: 277-282.

Bromage, Sarah, Alistair McCleery and David Finkelstein (2007). “’A Most Serviceable Drudge’: The Papermills of the Water of Leith.” The Quarterly: The Journal of the British Association of Paper Historians. 63 (October): 9-16.

Research Grants

2011-2012: Royal Society of Edinburgh Workshop Award in the Arts and Humanities (£7602), awarded as co-applicant with University of Stirling towards organisational costs of workshops and a conference on “Book Events: The Transnational Culture, Commerce and Social Impact of Literary Festivals”.

2011: Printing Historical Society Small Research Grant (£750) awarded as Principal Investigator, preliminary research on ‘Irish Printers on the Move: The Transnational Circulation of Irish Typographical Union Personnel, 1850-1900’.

2009: Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Grant ($10,000), awarded towards organisational costs of Autumn 2010 symposium on “Transnational Print Trade Migration, Identity and Skills Transfer in the British Imperial World, 1840-1918”.

2008-2011: AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award, “The Bartholomew Archive and Networks of Publishing and Geographical Knowledge, c.1830-c,1980”, second supervisor, in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh and the National Library of Scotland.

2008-09: Arts and Humanities Research Council Knowledge Catalyst Transfer Grant (£24,330) awarded as Principal Investigator for “Web 2.0 Application in an Archival Setting”. Co-funded by the AHRC and the National Library of Scotland (NLS), lead for a six month project embedding media literacy skills in the NLS, managing training workshops and supporting creation of short video pieces (video-blogs) promoting the John Murray Archive in online social network environments.