4th CBCP Postgraduate Symposium, 19 May 2026

The Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing (CBCP) is pleased to announce the 4th Postgraduate Symposium will take place on Tuesday, 19th May 2026. This will be a hybrid event and is an opportunity for PhD students and Postdoctoral researchers to present their research, engage in discussions on book cultures and publishing, and connect with a broader academic community within the University of Reading and beyond.

This year’s hybrid symposium will explore how archives can be used to reconstruct agency and cultural transmission in book and print cultures. It will be free to attend and refreshments will be provided.

Venue: Global Study Lounge, Edith Morley Building, University of Reading (Whiteknights Campus)

• To attend in person, please register here.
• To attend any of the Stream 1 talks, please register here.
• To attend any of the Stream 2 talks, please register here.

9.00 – 9:20 Arrival and refreshments

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9.20 – 9.25 Welcome and Introduction

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9.25 – 10.55 

Stream 1: Archiving children’s reading cultures and publishing ecosystems (chair: Sophie Heywood)

• Jessica Andrade-Tolentino – What makes a children’s book? Publishers’ strategies in transforming adult literature into picturebooks (online)
• Anagha Gopal – Mayil Will Not Be Quiet (about reading)!: Constructing a child’s archive of contemporary Indian children’s reading in English (online)
• Dina Tuasuun – Women, Faith, and Children’s Publishing in Indonesia:  Decolonial Readings of Religious Book Culture (online)
• Johari Imani Murray – From Bulletin to Blueprint: Paper Trails of Change and How the CIBC Shaped Children’s Publishing Ecosystems (online)

Stream 2: Publishing Archives (chair: Cristina De Luca)

• Monica Lucioni – A constellation of archives: on the making of Jules Laforgue’s first anthology of poems in Italian (1945) (online)
• Clara Farmer – Brand memory: the Hogarth Press and the publication of Olivia by ‘Olivia’ (1949) (in person)
• Ha Minjung –Reading Across the Atlantic: Virginia Woolf, the Yale Review, and the Construction of the American Reader (online)
• Margherita Orsi –Recovering La Tartaruga’s legacy: a journey through Milanese archives (online)

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11.00 – 11.15 Coffee break

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11.15 – 12. 45 

Stream 1: Archives and books in political discourse (chair: Cristina De Luca)

• Molly Uhlmann Lindberg – Authors as laborers and capitalists. Political self-publishing in 1970s Sweden (online)
• Meryem Selva Ince – The Social Realist Hit in 1970s Turkish Children’s Literature: Marginal Authors, Themes and Visual Aesthetics (online)
• Sharla Attala – Stitching the Past into the Present: A patchwork of memories (in person)
• Arina Stoenescu – Reconstructing the agency of the tehnoredactor in Communist Romania – 1948-1989: A story that a state-socialist colophon can tell (in person)

Stream 2: People’s trajectory and agency through archives (chair: Hyei Jin Kim)

• Marcus Leaver –Paul Hamlyn and Generational Change in Twentieth-Century British Publishing (in person)
• Reanna Brookes –The Archive as Practice: An Exploration of the Winifred Gill Papers (in person)
• Sophie Thompson – Crafting the Socialist Child: Arts and Crafts Pedagogy in Walter Crane’s Pothooks and Perseverance (1886) (in person)
• Giulia Pellizzatto –Global Readership, Transcultural Contexts: The Case of Daisaku Ikeda  (online)

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12.45 – 1.30 Lunch

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1.30 – 2.30 Workshop with MERL

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2.30 – 2.45 Coffee break

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2.45 – 4.00

Stream 1: Typography developments through the archives (chair: Abeera Zishan)

• Hanny Imania – Transforming genre, reconfiguring script: Javanese print culture under colonial print technology (in person)
• Yuseon Park – Digital revival: inheriting the analog legacy (online)
• Chandark Pradhan – Bengali chirography as a spectrum: evidence from the archives (online)
• Fraser Muggeridge – Towards a History of Alternative Typesetting (in person)

Stream 2: Print production, circulation and readers (chair: Pritha Mukherjee)

• Jessica Purdy –Circulating Knowledge: Continental Imprints in Provincial Seventeenth-Century England (in person)
• Michelle Michel – Book pirates: Villains or victims? (in person)
• Deborah Lyons – “Swallows Perched on Barbed Wire”: Readers in South Africa’s Final Years of Apartheid (online)
• Anamika Mohanta – Tracing the ‘Native Reader’ in 19th-Century Western India: Print, Agency and Readership in the Case of the Bombay-Poona Native General Library (online)

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4.00 – 5.00 

Stream 1: Alternative forms of archive (chair: Cristina De Luca)

• Elena Hueso Garcia – Materiality, Discourse and Cultural Transmission: Contemporary Picturebooks on Migration as Archival Interventions (online)
• Treensari Ghosh – Democratized Publishing: Fanfictions as Digital Archives (online)
• Daisy Johnson – “Here is the truth as I write it”:  The representation of young authors in early to mid-twentieth century children’s literature (in person)

Stream 2: Politics of page design (chair: Abeera Zishan)

• Angelika Wozniak –The communicative role of textbooks and guides on book design published in Poland between 1945 and 2000 in the context of socio-political changes (in person)
• Megan Patty –Revision in Print: Museum Publishing and the Production of Institutional Stance (recorded)
• Ksenia Papazova –The Materiality of the Page as a Photographic Filter in Neovintage Books (in person)

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5.00 – 5.15 Closing remarks