About
My background is in the history of publishing, and my doctoral thesis was on the emergence of printers' privileges and Letters Patent as a form of control within the English book trade, and the effects this had on nascent concepts of authors' and publishers' rights.
After completing a DPhil at the University of Oxford I worked for eight years on the Oxford English Dictionary project at OUP, running research programmes relating to the publication history and validity of OED's early-modern and medieval quotation evidence, and acting as a consultant to OED's editors on matters relating to early-modern and later medieval texts.
I left OED in 2009 to look after twin baby boys, and am currently undertaking freelance bibliographical research and consultancy for OED and more general freelance for other OUP dictionaries, as well as continuing to work (intermittently!) on early-modern concepts of intellectual property and (separately) the publication histories of early-modern recipe books. I am also the bibliographer for the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), and have recently been spending quite a lot of my non-toddler time reviewing books for SHARP News, The Library, Reviews in History, and the online journal Cercles.
Note: Prior to 2008, I worked and published under my maiden name of Meraud Grant Ferguson.
