Writing
Books
An Inky Business: A History of Newspapers from the English Civil Wars to the American Civil War (Reaktion Books, 2021)
Time and the French Revolution: the Republican Calendar, 1789-Year XV (Boydell & Brewer, 2012)
The Duke of Wellington (British Library Historic Lives) (British Library Publications, 2005)
Articles
'The Divell’s Hand’: Touching Special Collections', Inscription: The Journal of Material Text, 4 (2023)
Blog Posts
'Night at the Library: Books of Hope and Fear', School of Advanced Study, University of London, 2016
'Burning books: the Great Fire of London', Talking Humanities, School of Advanced Study, 1 August 2016
"It may be tempting fate to revisit a fire in a library, but as part of this autumn’s Being Human festival, the Institute of Historical Research is holding a ‘night at the library’ escape game in which participants, supported by librarians, will use the 250,000 volumes of published materials held at the library to solve a series of puzzles set by special guests from the past. Dr Matthew Shaw, who is leading this innovative event that also marks the 350th anniversary year of the Great Fire of London, explains that during the course of the night, guests will learn more about the disaster and the measures taken to save the country’s precious codices."
'Tech opens new frontiers for SAS libraries' (with Joanna Ashe, David Gee and Dr Raphaële Mouren), Talking Humanities, 12 June 2020
'The untold story of university libraries in lockdown', WonkHE, 1 July 2020
'Thomas Hardy’s Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres', The Queen's College, 21 December 2022
'A cancelled Booke of Common Prayer…for the use of the Church of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1637)', The Queen's College, 4 January 2023
‘Not a fine or a perfect copy’ (Dibdin). Shakespeare’s First Folio at The Queen’s College, Oxford', Folio 400, 23 February 2023
'AI in the Library', The Queen's College, 4 April 2023
'‘The Quirks of Blazoning Pens’: London, Shakespeare, and Coats of Arms', The Queen's College, 18 May 2023
'‘His name […] had become an empty sound’: Henry Markheim, “Markheim”, and Robert Louis Stevenson', The Queen's College Blog, 25 December 2023
"In 1880, the writer Robert Louis Stevenson contacted the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette about the title of a short story on which he was working: ‘Probably “Markheim” is as good a name as I shall find for the story, in case you are in haste to use it’. Despite the doubts, the eponymous title stuck, and when the tale was subsequently published in Unwin’s Christmas Annual in 1885 (after the story was pulled from the Gazette for being too short and replaced by The Body Snatcher), the tale appeared under that designation."