Richard Ovenden is Bodley’s Librarian, the 25th person to hold the senior executive position in the library of the University of Oxford. Since 1987 he has worked in a number of important archives and libraries, including the House of Lords Library, the National Library of Scotland (as a Curator of Rare Books) and in the University of Edinburgh, where he was Director of Collections. He moved to the Bodleian Libraries in 2003 as Keeper of Special Collections, becoming Deputy Librarian in 2011. Richard was awarded the OBE in The Queen’s Birthday Honours, 2019.
Richard has written extensively on professional concerns of library and information management, and on the history of the deliberate destruction of knowledge. Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack (2020), was published by John Murray in the UK and by Harvard University Press in the US. It was a Radio 4 Book of the Week and a Times Book of the Year. ‘”Passionate and illuminating… this splendid book reveals how, in today’s world of fake news and alternative facts, libraries stand defiant as guardians of truth” — The Times.
Tiffany Watt Smith is a cultural historian. Her most recent book Schadenfreude: The Joy of Another’s Misfortune explores this much-maligned emotion, and was published in Autumn 2018 (UK, Wellcome/Profile; US, Little Brown). Her previous book, The Book of Human Emotions(UK Wellcome/Profile 2015; US Little Brown, 2016) tells the stories of 154 feelings from around the world, and has been published in 9 countries so far. She is also the author of an academic monograph On Flinching (OUP, 2014). Her latest book, Bad Friend (Faber, 2025) offers what’s long overdue: a more expansive, more rebellious vision of female friendship fit for twenty-first-century life.
She was educated at the universities of Cambridge and London, and is currently a senior research fellow at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London, and a lecturer in the School of English and Drama there. Her research has been funded by the Wellcome Trust, the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
In 2014, she was named a BBC New Generation Thinker, and appears frequently on BBC Radio 4 and 3. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New Scientist, BBC Magazine and The Pool among others. Her TED talk The History of Human Emotions has been viewed by over 1.6 million people around the world.
Dr Ian Black (1953-2023) was a Middle East editor, diplomatic editor and European editor for the Guardian newspaper. He reported and commented extensively on the Arab uprisings and their aftermath in Syria, Libya and Egypt, and paid frequent visits to Iran, the Gulf and across the MENA region. He earned an MA in History and Social and Political Science from the University of Cambridge and held a PhD in government from LSE.
During his accomplished career, Ian wrote for the Economist, the Washington Post and many other publications, and was a regular commentator on TV and radio on Middle Eastern and international affairs. He wrote the introduction to The Arab Spring(Guardian Books, 2012); Israel’s Secret Wars (Grove Press, 1991), Zionism and the Arabs, 1936–1939 (Taylor & Francis, 1986, 2015); and contributed to the Encyclopaedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa (Macmillan Library Reference, 2004).
His book, Enemies and Neighbours: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017, told a new history of the Palestine–Israel conflict to mark the centenary of the Balfour Declaration and the 50th anniversary of the 1967 war. Published by Allen Lane in 2017, it has been hailed as ‘a nuanced, landmark study that deservedly won plaudits from both Palestinian and Israeli historians’ (The Times).
Chloe won a ARHC studentship to study the MA in Creative Writing at Newcastle University where she graduated with distinction, winning the universities taught masters prize and Northern Writers Award. Her debut novel Fish Boy was published by Faber & Faber in 2017 to critical acclaim; it was nominated for the Carnegie Medal, longlisted for the UKLA and shortlisted for the Branford Boase children’s debut of the year.
Chloe won the inaugural Julia Darling Fellowship to research her second novel The Boy Who Hit Play (Faber, 2018), travelling around the wild icy land of Norway and its many beautiful islands, then journeyed across the otherworldly land of Peru thanks to the fantastic support of the Arts Council England. Her third novel, Fire Girl Forest Boy, was published in June 2019 by Faber, and won the Gandys Children’s Travel Book of the Year.
Chloe Daykin lives in Northumberland with her family including one husband, two boys and three cats. She loves an unusual adventure and is a fan of all things fun, poetic and surprising.
Josephine is currently Professor of Ancient History at Oxford University, and Martin Frederiksen Fellow and Tutor of Ancient History at Worcester College, Oxford. In January 2025 she will take up the Professorship of Ancient History at the University of Cambridge, the eighth person and first woman to hold that position since its creation in 1898. She has degrees from Oxford and Berkeley, she has taught in America, Italy, and the UK, and she co-directed the Tunisian-British archaeological excavations at Utica. She is a regular contributor to the LRB, as well as to radio and television programmes.
Her latest academic book, In Search of the Phoenicians, was published by Princeton University Press in January 2018, and her first trade book, How the World Made the West, was published by Bloomsbury in February 2024. It tells the story of the diverse roots of western civilization from the Bronze Age to the Age of Discovery, and makes the case that understanding societies in isolation is both out-of-date and wrong. It is contact and connections, rather than solitary civilisations, that drive historical change. It is not peoples that make history – people do.
Andrew Pettegree is one of the leading experts on Europe during the Reformation. He currently holds a professorship at St Andrews University where he is the director of the Universal Short Title Catalogue Project.
His prizewinning study of early print culture, The Book in the Renaissance (Yale University Press, 2010) was a New York Times notable book of the year, and The Invention of News (Yale University Press, 2014) won Harvard University’s Goldsmith Prize. Brand Luther: 1517, Print and the Making of the Reformation(Penguin, 2015), was described by the Washington Post as ‘A remarkable story, and one sure to change the way we think about the early Reformation’. The Library: A Fragile History, was published in 2021, and co-written with Arthur der Weduwen. This ‘sweeping, absorbing history’ (Richard Ovenden) was named a Sunday Times Book of the Year and longlisted for the HWA Non-Fiction Crown 2022. In 2021, Andrew was elected a Fellow of The British Academy.
In his latest book, The Book At War (Profile, 2023), Andrew traces the surprising ways in which written culture – from travel guides and scientific papers to Biggles and Anne Frank – has shaped, and been shaped, by the conflicts of the modern age.
Michael Woodridge is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Oxford, where he uses game theory to understand how to build AI agents that can cooperate with each other. He has won national and international awards for research, science communication and scientific leadership. In 2023 he presented the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures and in 2025 was awarded the Michael Faraday Prize and Lecture by the Royal Society for his significant contributions as a leading AI researcher, educator, and popularizer of AI through his books, lectures, and media work.
His books include Artificial Intelligence(2018), part of the Ladybird Expert series, and The Road to Conscious Machines, which was published by Pelican in 2020. Life Lessons in Game Theory: The Art of Thinking Strategically in a Complex World, will be published by Wildfire in 2026.
James teaches English Literature and Film Studies at the University of Ottawa. His first book, Gilded Youth: Privilege and Rebellion in the British Public School, was published by Reaktion in February 2019.
His new book, Accelerate! A History of the 1990s, was published by The History Press in 2022.
Nick Chater is Professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School. He founded WBS’s Behavioural Science group, which this the largest of its kind in Europe, is co-founder of research consultancy Decision Technology, advises the UK’s Behavioural Insights Team and was scientist-in-residence on the BBC Radio 4 series The Human Zoo. He is a member of the UK committee on Climate Change, and a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society and British Academy.
The Mind is Flat: The Illusion of Mental Depth was published by Allen Lane in 2018 and won the American Association of Publishers PROSE Award in 2019, for Best book in Clinical Psychology. The Language Game: How Improvisation Created Language and Changed the World, co-written with Morten H. Christiansen, was published Bantam Press in the UK and by Basic Books in the US – both in Spring 2022.
Dominic Frisby is that unusual combination, a comedian and a financial writer. He has written two previous books,Life After the State(2013) and Bitcoin (2014), both for Unbound. Daylight Robbery: The Past, Present and Future of Tax, was published by Penguin Portfolio in 2019.
His latest book, The Secret History of Gold (Penguin, 2025), is the definitive biography of the metal that has shaped our world – and may yet determine its fate.
