**Last minute change:  booking is essential for this event: https://ies.sas.ac.uk/history-libraries-seminar.

Speaker:  Dr Rachel Eckersley (University of Leeds): "To Open the Institution, Well Provided with all Necessary Supplies of Furniture, Library and Apparatus": the Development of English Dissenting Academy Libraries 1795-1900’.

Dissenting academies were founded in the aftermath of the Act of Uniformity of 1662 to provide Protestant students who dissented from the Church of England with a higher education comparable to that available in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. This paper draws together research from published and forthcoming work on the approach taken by dissenting communities in England during the 18th and 19th centuries to develop the holdings and physical spaces of their academy libraries.