During her Visiting Research Fellowship at the CBCP, Reanna Brooks will pursue an archival study of the early circulation of small-press modernism in the post-First World War period. The project focuses on W.H. Smith’s acquisition and distribution of handmade and limited-edition books, including early Hogarth Press titles that have traditionally been understood as circulating only through private presses or specialist bookshops. Working with purchasing ledgers and in-house trade periodicals held in the W.H. Smith Business Archive, she will assess whether these acquisitions formed part of a broader, under-recognised pattern of engagement with small presses. The Fellowship will also support the development of this research into a postdoctoral project on small-press circulation and modernist publishing networks.
Reanna is in the final months of her DPhil in English at the University of Oxford. Her research examines the material dimensions of modernist literary production, with a particular focus on Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press. She works through close engagement with physical books and archival records to understand how making shaped modernist writing and publishing practice. Central to her work is the claim that craft—rather than serving as a decorative supplement—functioned as a form of intellectual and aesthetic decision-making. Her publications explore Woolf’s hands-on involvement in bookbinding and print, and they situate these practices within feminist approaches to material authorship and archival recovery.