Angéline Rais is an early career research fellow at the Institute of English Studies, based in the School of Advanced Study at the University of London. She works in the history of the book, specialising in the study of the antiquarian book-trade and the formation of libraries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her doctoral thesis (Oxford, in preparation for publication) investigated the market in rare books in Switzerland in the first half of the nineteenth century through the acquisitions of the English collector Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792–1872) there in 1822–23 and their dispersal after his death. As a postdoctoral fellow on the ERC-funded CULTIVATE MSS Project (University of London), she explored the activities of German antiquarian booksellers, in particular Jacques Rosenthal (1854–1937) of Munich and Martin Breslauer (1871–1940) of Berlin, in the early twentieth century. Her current research develops this topic and examines the contributions of dealers to the scholarship on medieval manuscript and printed books. She has also catalogued rare books at Lambeth Palace Library in London, the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris, the Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire in Fribourg (Switzerland) and the Médiathèque-Valais in Sion (Switzerland).

Research project at EXC Temporal Communities:

Assessing German Medieval Literature in the Twentieth Century: The Role of Antiquarian Booksellers