Dr Charles Read

Charles Read lectures, examines and supervises for the Faculty of History, where he is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, and for the Faculty of Economics, where he is an Affiliated Lecturer. He also serves as the Junior Proctor of the University of Cambridge for the academic year 2023/24. At Corpus, he is a Fellow, Tutor, Director of Studies and College Lecturer teaching both history and economics. He is also the Director of the Bridging Course at Corpus, an innovative new scheme designed to significantly increase the share of student body from under-represented backgrounds, which includes a residential summer school at the College each summer.

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, 2 Jan 2023) and articles in the Economic History Review, the Historical Journal, History and Irish Economic and Social History. He is currently writing his third monograph, The 1847 Financial Crisis, the British Empire and the Origins of Gentlemanly Capitalism, which is under contract with Oxford University Press.

He has won four major academic prizes for his doctoral research. 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.