British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Faculty of History, Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Economics, Junior Pro-Proctor

Charles Read lectures, examines and supervises for the Faculty of History, where he is a postdoctoral fellow. He is also an affiliated lecturer in the Faculty of Economics. His research examines the political economy of financial crises and famines in Great Britain, Ireland and the British Empire in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. He is an expert on the relationship between economic policy and financial stability in Britain and Ireland over the past two centuries.

His publications include The Great Famine in Ireland and Britain’s Financial Crisis (Woodbridge: Economic History Society/The Boydell Press, 25 Oct 2022), Calming the storms: The Carry Trade, the Banking School and British Financial Crises since 1825 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 11 Dec 2022) and articles in the Economic History Review, the Historical Journal, History and Irish Economic and Social History. He is currently writing his third monograph Gentlemanly Capitalism, the 1847 Financial Crisis and the Development of the British Empire, which is under contract with Oxford University Press.

He has won more academic prizes for his research than any other early-career scholar of his generation in economic history. The research for his first project, for a doctoral thesis on the Irish Famine entitled ‘British Economic Policy and Ireland, c.1841-53’, has won the Thirsk-Feinstein PhD Dissertation Prize, the T.S. Ashton Prize for the best Economic History Review article and the New Researcher Prize of the Economic History Society. In August 2018 at the 18th World Economic History Congress at MIT he was also awarded a prestigious prize from the International Economic History Association for the best dissertation in nineteenth-century economic history completed at any university in the world in 2015, 2016 or 2017.