Rate My Professor Siobhan Talbott

Professor Siobhan Talbott is Professor of Economic and Social History in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Keele University, where she serves as Head of School and Director of Education for the School of Humanities. She also chairs the Faculty Student Experience and Engagement Group and leads the Strategic Research Group for Outputs in the Faculty of Business, Law, Humanities and Social Sciences. Talbott earned her PhD from the University of St Andrews in 2010, having begun her undergraduate studies there in 2002 and received funding for a Master's degree. Following postdoctoral research fellowships at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, and the University of Manchester, she joined Keele as a Lecturer in 2014. She advanced to Senior Lecturer in 2018, Reader in 2022, and Professor in 2024.

An economic and social historian specializing in business history, Talbott's research examines how commercial information was created, disseminated, and received in the early modern Atlantic world, addressing information exchange, knowledge consumption, and business education acquisition. She has a particular interest in publishing critical editions of manuscript material. Her first monograph, Conflict, Commerce and Franco-Scottish Relations, 1560-1713, published in 2014, won the 2016 Senior Hume Brown Prize for the best first book in Scottish history and was highly commended in the Frank Watson prize competition. Earlier work on the Franco-Scottish Auld Alliance and British trade with France earned the IHR’s Pollard Prize, the Economic and Social History Society of Scotland's essay prize, the Northern Studies essay prize, and the Scottish History Society's Rosebery Prize. Talbott held an AHRC Leadership Fellowship from 2018 to 2022 and a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship from 2022 to 2023, supporting her project on information and education in early modern business. Her forthcoming monograph, Knowledge, Information, and Business Education in the British Atlantic World, 1620-1760, is under contract with Oxford University Press. She co-edited Business News in the Early Modern Atlantic World with Sophie Jones (Brill, 2024), edited The Letter-book of Thomas Baret, 1672-1677 (Norfolk Record Society, 2021), and has two further editions under contract. Talbott is co-editor of the Royal Historical Society's Camden Series, a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a member of the AHRC Peer Review College, and Pathway Lead for Economic and Social History for the ESRC NWSSDTP. She supervises PhD students and teaches on early modern Britain, Europe, and the Atlantic World.