Dr Mark Purcell

Deputy Director, Research and Collections

Directorate: Research Collections

Email: mp790@cam.ac.uk

Mark Purcell is Deputy Director for Research and Collections at the University Library, with strategic oversight of the heritage collections of one of the world’s greatest research library, and also heads the CUL Research Institute. Before coming to Cambridge, he was for sixteen years the Libraries Curator of the National Trust, working earlier in his career at the Bodleian and at Christ Church, Oxford. His research has focused on libraries and book collecting in Britain and Ireland, and particularly on libraries in country houses. His other main interest is early music, and he is a former Oxford and cathedral organ scholar.  

Select publications:

Books

• The Country House Library in Britain and Ireland (New Haven: Yale, 2017).
• [With William Hale and David Pearson], Treasures from the Library of Lord Fairhaven at Anglesey Abbey (London: Scala, 2014),
• [With Nicola Thwaite], The Libraries at Calke Abbey (London: National Trust, 2013).
• The Big House Library in Ireland: Books in Ulster Country Houses (London: National Trust 2011).

Articles and Chapters

• ‘The Country House Library in Scotland’, Elizabethanne Boran, Book Collecting in Ireland and Britain (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2018), pp. 206-22.
• ‘Libraries at Hardwick’, David Adshead and David Taylor, eds., A Great Old Castle of Romance: Hardwick Hall (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2016), pp. 177-91.
• Author/editor of 38 entries in the Directory of Rare Books and Special Collections in the UK and Republic of Ireland (London: Facet, 2016)
• ‘Making History: the Library at Wallington’, National Trust Historic Houses & Collections Annual (2014), pp. 16-21.
• [With James Fishwick], ‘The Library at Ickworth’, The Book Collector, LXIII, 3 (Autumn 2012), pp. 367-90.
• ‘‘Settled in the North of Ireland’: or, Where did Sloane come from?’, in Alison Walker, Arthur MacGregor and Michael Hunter, From Books to Bezoars: Sir Hans Sloane and his Collections (London: British Library, 2012), pp. 24-32.
• ‘The Library at Penrhyn Castle’, The Book Collector, LIX, 2 (Summer 2010), pp. 241-53.
• ‘National Trust Libraries in Wales’, National Trust Historic Houses and Collections Annual (2011), pp. 12-19.
• ‘From Bury to Bromham: Books at Canons Ashby’, National Trust Historic Houses and Collections Annual (2010), pp. 18-25.
• ‘The Library at Ham House’, The Book Collector, LV, 4 (Winter 2006), pp. 509-24.
• ‘Master Petypher’s Virgil: the Anatomy of a Tudor School Book’, The Book Collector, L, 4 (Winter 2001), pp. 471-92.
• ”A lunatick of unsound mind”: Edward, Lord Leigh (1742–86) and the refounding of Oriel College Library’, Bodleian Library Record, XVII (Apr-Oct 2001), pp. 246-260.
• ‘Books and Readers in Eighteenth-Century Westmorland: the Brownes of Townend’, Library History, XVII (2001), pp. 91-106.

Affiliated organisations:

• Bye-Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge: Dr Mark Purcell | Pembroke (cam.ac.uk)
• Director, the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL): About CERL [CERL]
• Member of Steering Committee for Cambridge Centre for Material Texts: https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/cmt/

Professional memberships:

• Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
• Fellow and former Vice-President, the Society of Antiquaries of London
• Bibliographical Society of London