After a circuitous and discipline bending academic journey, Dr Withers is currently historian of publishing, especially the cultural and business aspects, using interdisciplinary methods that utilise oral history and archival sources. Recent research conducted while Research Fellow on the Leverhulme-funded project The Business of Women’s Words: Purpose and Profit in Feminist Publishing, has focused on the feminist publisher Virago Press. Virago Reprints and Modern Classics: The Timely Business of Feminist Publishing was published in 2021.
Prior to this, their research engaged with questions of transmission, feminism, archives and the digital – their monograph Feminism, Digital Culture and the Politics of Transmission: Theory, Practice and Cultural Heritage won the Feminist Studies Association Book Prize in 2016. Their PhD, awarded in 2008, told stories about subjectivity in Kate Bush’s music; in 2019 they were delighted to give the opening keynote at This Woman’s Work, the first academic conference dedicated to Bush’s music and career.
Alongside academic work, Dr Withers is an experienced curator. They acted as curatorial consultant for the British Library exhibition Unfinished Business: the Fight for Women’s Rights (2020-21) and was guest curator for Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance Act 3 (2019). In 2011 they curated Sistershow Revisited: Feminism in Bristol 1973-75 and in 2012 Music & Liberation, a touring exhibition about music making in the women’s liberation movement.
They are currently working on several projects, including a biography of populist publisher and philanthropist Paul Hamlyn, provisionally titled Business for Pleasure: The Life and Enterprises of Paul Hamlyn; a slate of screenplays for television, including several dramatisations of forgotten feminist and queer histories; and a reprint publishing project.