David Vincent at the Privacy Studies Journal Inaugural Conference

David Vincent’s research interests cover working-class autobiography, British and European Literacy, and the cultural and political histories of secrecy, privacy and solitude. He is the author or editor of seventeen books including Bread Knowledge and Freedom. A Study of Nineteenth Century Working Class Autobiography (Europa 1979, Methuen 1982); The Autobiography of the Working Class [with John Burnet and David Mayall], 3 vols (Harvester 1984, 1987, 1989); Literacy and Popular Culture. England 1750-1914 (Cambridge University Press 1989, 1993); The Culture of Secrecy: Britain 1832-1998 (Oxford University Press 1998); The Rise of Mass Literacy. Reading and Writing in Modern Europe (Polity Press, 2000).

His most recent books are: I hope I Don’t Intrude. Privacy and its Dilemmas in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Privacy. A Short History (Polity Press, Cambridge, 2016). His chapter on ‘Working Class Autobiography’ was published in Adam Smyth (ed.) A History of English Autobiography (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and a chapter on ‘Social Reform’ was published in The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens (Oxford University Press, 2018). He has in press ‘The Modern History of Literacy’ in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Education, edited by John L. Rury and Eileen H. Tamura (Oxford University Press). He has written on the historical context of the current controversies over government surveillance, including ‘Surveillance, Privacy and History’, History and Policy October 2013 and has recently given papers on ‘Privacy and the Liberal State’ and on the draft Investigatory Powers Bill for the Technology and Democracy Project at CRASSH, Cambridge. His next major book is A History of Solitude , published by Polity Press in 2020.