Publications about the ODNB
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is one of the most renowned and trusted biography resources among scholars and researchers, offering a comprehensive collection of digital articles on individuals who shaped British history.
- Josh McLoughlin, Engelsberg Ideas, 2023
- Martin Farr, Reviews in History, 2012
Few publications have been written about in as much detail as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The following bibliography includes many of the most significant academic publications focusing on the history or content of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), published since 2004, and its predecessor, the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB), first published in 1885. Chart the legacy of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography through the publications below.
Publications after 2004
Annette Peach, ‘“Is he worth doing?”: Lionel Cust and the presentation of national history in the Dictionary of National Biography and the National Portrait Gallery’, British Art Journal, 5/2 (Autumn 2004), 35-42, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41615290.
Philip Carter, ‘From the Cracks of History’, History Today, 54/10 (October 2004), 18-20, https://www.historytoday.com/archive/cracks-history.
Brian Harrison, ‘“A Slice of Their Lives”: Editing the DNB, 1882-1999’, English Historical Review, 119/484 (November 2004), 1179-1201, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3490350.
Elizabeth Baigent, ‘The Geography of Biography, the Biography of Geography: Rewriting the Dictionary of National Biography’, Journal of Historical Geography, 30/3 (2004), 531-51, https://doi-org.ezproxy-prd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/10.1016/S0305-7488(03)00044-6.
Mavis Mate, ‘The Status of Women in the Oxford DNB’, Medieval Prosopography, 25 (2004), 217-21, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44946455.
Christina von Nolcken, ‘Wyclif, the Wycliffites, and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’, Medieval Prosopography, 25 (2004), 222-31, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44946456.
David Amigoni, ‘Distinctively queer little morsels: Imagining distinction, groups, and difference in the DNB and the ODNB’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 10/2 (January 2005), 279-88, https://doi.org/10.3366/jvc.2005.10.2.279.
Alison Booth, ‘Fighting for Lives in the ODNB, or Taking Prosopography Personally’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 10/2 (January 2005), 267-79, https://doi.org/10.3366/jvc.2005.10.2.267.
Elizabeth Baigent, Charlotte Brewer, and Vivienne Larminie, ‘Gender in the archive: women in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the Oxford English Dictionary’, Archives, 30/113 (April 2005), 13-35, http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/archives.2005.2.
Kevin Whelan, ‘Surfing an Ocean of Data: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’, History Ireland, 13/3 (May-June 2005), 42-47, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27725274.
Keith Thomas, Changing Conceptions of National Biography: The Oxford DNB in Historical Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
William D. Rubinstein, ‘Jews in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’, Jewish Historical Studies, 40 (2005), 247-51, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24027035.
Stuart James, ‘Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’, Reference Reviews, 19/1 (2005), 58-60, https://doi.org/10.1108/09504120510573981.
Ray Anderson, ‘The Brewing Connection in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’, Brewery History, 119 (2005), 10-23, http://www.breweryhistory.com/journal/archive/119/bh-119-010.html, and 120 (2005), 20-34, http://www.breweryhistory.com/journal/archive/120/bh-120-020.htm.
Roger Kimball, ‘Gallimaufry & more: “The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography”’, The New Criterion, 23/5 (2005), 4-10.
Henry R.T. Summerson, ‘People, Places and Shifting Perspectives in the Dictionary of National Biography’, Local Historian, 36/2 (2006), 76-91.
Vivienne Larminie, ‘The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the du Moulin Connection and the Location of the Church of England in the Later Seventeenth Century’, in Anne Dunan-Page (ed), The Religious Culture of the Huguenots, 1660-1750 (Ashgate, 2006), 55-68.
Christine MacLeod and Alessandro Nuvolari, ‘The Pitfalls of Prosopography: Inventors in the Dictionary of National Biography’, Technology and Culture, 47/4 (October 2006), 757-76, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40061119.
Rupert Mann, ‘Searching the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’, Indexer, 25/1 (2006), 16-18, https://doi.org/10.3828/indexer.2006.6.
Essaka Joshua and Eleoma Joshua, ‘William Weir, Thomas James Arnold, and the Attribution of Articles in the Wellesley Index and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’, Scottish Historical Review, 86/2 (2007), 319-27, https://doi.org/10.3366/shr.2007.86.2.319.
James Raven, ‘Review: The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: Dictionary or Encyclopaedia?’, Historical Journal, 50/4 (December 2007), 991-1006, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20175137.
Helen Foxhall Forbes et al, ‘Anglo-Saxon and related entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)’, Anglo-Saxon England, 37 (2008), 183-232, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0263675109990202.
Henry R.T. Summerson, ‘Rethinking Medieval People: the experience of the DNB’, in J. Boffey and V. Davis (eds), Recording Medieval Lives: Proceedings of the 2005 Harlaxton Symposium, Harlaxton Medieval Studies, 17 (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2009), 1-13.
John Ashley Vickers, ‘Methodist Entries in the Oxford DNB’, Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society, 57/1 (2009), 1-4.
Henry R.T. Summerson, ‘A "Nest of Freres": the Mendicants, their friends and enemies in the Oxford DNB’, in Nicholas John Rogers (ed), The Friars in Medieval Britain: Proceedings of the 2007 Harlaxton Symposium, Harlaxton Medieval Studies, 19 (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2010), 208-17.
Lucy Riall, ‘The Shallow End of History? The Substance and Future of Political Biography’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 40/3 (Winter 2010), 375-97, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20685511.
Mark Curthoys, ‘Recent additions to the Oxford DNB: local lives in national biography’, Local Historian, 40/4 (2010), 324-28.
Philip Carter, ‘Opportunities for National Biography Online: The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2005-2012’, in Nolan Melanie and Fernon Christine (eds), The ADB’s Story (ANU Press, 2013), 357-72, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hgxv9.17.
Lawrence Goldman, ‘A Monument to the Victorian Age? Continuity and Discontinuity in the Dictionaries of National Biography, 1882-2004’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 11/1 (January 2010), 111-32, https://doi.org/10.3366/jvc.2006.11.1.111.
Ruth Watts, ‘Collecting Women's Lives in “National” History: opportunities and challenges in writing for the ODNB’, Women's History Review, 19/1 (2010), 109-24, Doi: 10.1080/09612020903444700.
Martin Farr, ‘Online dictionaries of national biography’, Reviews in History, 1259 (2012), https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1259/.
John Kendall, ‘Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’, Reference Reviews, 27/7 (2013), 10-13, https://doi.org/10.1108/RR-07-2013-0169.
Andrew Lambert, ‘“Our Naval Plutarch”: Sir John Knox Laughton and the Dictionary of National Biography’, The Mariner’s Mirror, 84/3 (March 2013), 308-15, https://doi.org/10.1080/00253359.1998.10656702.
Lawrence Goldman, ‘Contemporary and Historical Biography: The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004-14: A Ten-Year Review’, The Historian, 121 (2014), 14-18.
Mark Curthoys, ‘ODNB's tenth anniversary: local history research in a national resource’, Local Historian, 44/4 (2014), 325-34.
Christopher Warren, Daniel Shore, Jessica Otis, Lawrence Wang, Mike Finegold, and Cosma Shalizi, ‘Six Degrees of Francis Bacon: A Statistical Method for Reconstructing Large Historical Social Networks’, Digital Humanities Quarterly, 10/3 (July 2016), http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/10/3/000244/000244.html.
Krista Cowman, ‘Collective Biography’, in Simon Gunn and Lucy Faire (eds), Research Methods for History (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 85-103.
Christopher Warren, ‘Historiography’s Two Voices: Data Infrastructure and History at Scale in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB)’, Journal of Cultural Analytics (November 2018), 10.31235/osf.io/rbkdh.
Philip Carter, ‘What is National Biography for? Dictionaries and Digital History’, in Karen Fox (ed), ‘True Biographies of Nations?’: The Cultural Journeys of Dictionaries of National Biography, (ANU Press, 2019), 57-78, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvh4zjhx.7.
David Cannadine, ‘British National Biography and Global British Lives: From the DNB to the ODNB – and Beyond?’, in Karen Fox (ed), ‘True Biographies of Nations?’: The Cultural Journeys of Dictionaries of National Biography (ANU Press, 2019), 193-208, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvh4zjhx.14.
Henry Summerson, ‘T.F. Tout and the Dictionary of National Biography’, in Caroline M. Barron and Joel Thomas Rosenthal (eds), Thomas Frederick Tout (1855-1929): Refashioning History for the Twentieth Century (University of London Press, 2019), 231-46, https://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/9310/1/Tout.pdf.
Helen Kingstone, ‘Representing the 1819 Cohort in the Dictionary of National Biography’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 24/4 (2019), 460-68, https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcz048.
Sue Hawkins, ‘Book Review: Lives of Twenty Leaders in 20th Century UK Nursing Added to Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’, Bulletin of the UK Association for the History of Nursing, 8/1 (UK Association for the History of Nursing, 2020)
Cara Murray, ‘Cultivating Chaos: Entropy, Information, and the Making of the Dictionary of National Biography’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 50/1 (2022), 87-116, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150320000121.
David Cannadine, ‘Inexhaustible Vicissitudes: The DNB, OUP, and the ODNB, from Sir Leslie Stephen to Sir Brian Harrison’, in Bruce Kinzer, Molly Baer Kramer, and Richard Trainor (eds), Reform and Its Complexities in Modern Britain: Essays Inspired by Sir Brian Harrison (Oxford University Press, 2022), 118-39.
Helen Kingstone, ‘Collective Biography as Monument? The Dictionary of National Biography’, in Helen Kingstone, Panoramas and Compilations in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Seeing the Big Picture (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2022), 199-234.
Publications before 2004
Sidney Lee, Principles of Biography (Cambridge University Press, 1911).
A.F. Pollard, ‘Sir Sidney Lee and the Dictionary of National Biography’, Historical Research, 4/10 (June 1926), 1-13, https://doi-org.ezphost.dur.ac.uk/10.1111/j.1468-2281.1926.tb00400.x.
G.F. Nuttall, ‘Alexander Gordon’s Obiter Dicta from the Dictionary of National Biography’, Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society, 8/1 (1943), 35-38.
D.H. Rees, ‘Sir Daniel Lleufer Thomas and the Dictionary of National Biography’, Journal of the Welsh Bibliographical Society, 8/4 (1957), 171-88.
Laurel Brake, ‘Problems in Victorian Biography: The DNB and the DNB “Walter Pater”’, The Modern Language Review, 70/4 (October 1975), 731-42, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3725628.
Carolyn W. White, ‘The Biographer and Edward VII: Sir Sidney Lee and the Embarrassments of Royal Biography’, Victorian Studies, 27/3 (Spring 1984), 301-19, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3826855.
Gaye Tuchman and Nina E. Fortin, ‘Fame and Misfortune: Edging Women Out of the Great Literary Tradition’, American Journal of Sociology, 90/1 (July 1984), 72-96, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2779327.
Ronald H. Fritze, ‘The Dictionary of National Biography and Its Early Editors and Publisher’, Reference Services Review, 16/4 (April 1988), 21-29, https://doi.org/10.1108/eb049033.
David Amigoni, ‘Life histories and the cultural politics of historical knowing: the Dictionary of National Biography and the late nineteenth-century political field’, The Sociological Review, 37 (May 1989), 144-66, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.1989.tb03341.x.
Gillian Fenwick, ‘The Athenaeum and the Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1901’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 23/4 (Winter 1990), 180-88, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20082487.
Gillian Fenwick, Leslie Stephen’s Life in Letters: A Bibliographical Study (Scolar Press, 1993)
Elizabeth Baigent, ‘Geography, geographers and the New Dictionary of National Biography’, Journal of Historical Geography, 19/4 (October 1993), 448-52, https://doi.org/10.1006/jhge.1993.1028.
Elizabeth Baigent, ‘The RSA and the New Dictionary of National Biography’, RSA Journal, 141/5444 (November 1993), 828-9, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41376307.
Elizabeth Baigent, ‘Recreating Our Past: Geography and the Rewriting of the Dictionary of National Biography’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 19/2 (1994), 225-27, https://www.jstor.org/stable/622756.
Martin J. Daunton, ‘The New Dictionary of National Biography and Business History’, Business Archives, 68 (1994), 1-4.
Gillian Fenwick, Women and the Dictionary of National Biography: A Bibliography of DNB Volumes, 1885-1985 and ‘Missing Persons’ (Scolar Press, 1994).
Henry Summerson, ‘Problems of Medieval Biography: Revising DNB’, Medieval Prosopography, 17/2 (Autumn 1996), 197-222, https://www.jstor.org/stable/44946239.
H.C.G. Matthew, Leslie Stephen and the New Dictionary of National Biography (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Elizabeth Baigent, ‘The New Dictionary of National Biography: Revising a Well-Loved National Institution’, Genealogists’ Magazine, 25/9 (1997), 358-61.
Annette Peach, ‘New Dictionary of National Biography: Art and architecture’, The British Art Journal, 2/1 (Autumn 2000), 83-84, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41615020.
Robert Faber and Brian Harrison, ‘The Dictionary of National Biography: A Publishing History’, in Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote (eds), Lives in Print: Biography and the Book Trade from the Middle Ages to the 21st Century (British Library and Oak Knoll, 2002), 171-92.
Blogs about the dictionary
Philip Carter, ‘Londoners Calling: biography from the ‘bottom up’’, OUP blog (24 May 2012), https://blog.oup.com/2012/05/oxford-dictionary-national-biography-henry-croft/.
Lawrence Goldman, ‘Making histories: the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’, Making History, https://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/articles/ODNB.html#resources.
David Hill Radcliffe, ‘The Oxford DNB at 10: new research opportunities in the humanities’, OUP blog (18 September 2014), https://blog.oup.com/2014/09/oxford-dnb-at-10-online/.
Henry Summerson, ‘The Oxford DNB at 10: new perspectives on medieval biography’, OUP blog (25 September 2014), https://blog.oup.com/2014/09/oxford-dnb-10-new-perspectives-medieval-biography/.
Philip Carter, ‘The Oxford DNB at 10: what we know now’, OUP blog (9 October 2014), https://blog.oup.com/2014/10/oxford-dnb-10-changes-in-historical-research/.
Alex May, ‘The Oxford DNB at 10: biography and contemporary history’, OUP blog (16 October 2014), https://blog.oup.com/2014/10/oxford-dnb-contemporary-history/.
Emily Hansen, ‘Profiling schoolmasters in early modern England’, OUP blog (28 September 2016), https://blog.oup.com/2016/09/profiling-english-schoolmasters-odnb/.
Josh McLoughlin, ‘An ode to the DNB’, Engelsberg Ideas (1 Aug 2023), https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/an-ode-to-the-odnb/.
Other items
‘Lasting Fame: The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’, The Documentary, BBC World Service, 12 September 2018, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csxhj5, and ‘National International: The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’, The Documentary, BBC World Service, 19 September 2018, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csxhj6.
Christopher Warren, ‘What do we know about the ODNB? Elite Lives at Scale’, Digital History (23 May 2017), https://www.history.ac.uk/podcasts/digital-history/what-do-we-know-about-odnb-elite-lives-scale.
Christopher Warren, Six Degrees of Sir Francis Bacon, http://www.sixdegreesoffrancisbacon.com/.
