Online panel: Translation outreach in schools and the move online
2021-05-05 18:00 - 19:30 (Europe/London)
This online panel event is free and open to all. Please register your interest to receive a personal invitation: https://bit.ly/3wzSYGK
The Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing and Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism at the University of Reading, in partnership with Outside in World, the organisation dedicated to promoting and exploring world literature and children’s books in translation, are delighted to invite you to a free online panel event on translation outreach in schools.
Translation workshops and activities with schools are a powerful way to nurture new linguists, promote understanding of multilingualism, raise confidence among multilingual students, and foster inclusive thinking. The panel brings together some of the most exciting people and organisations currently working with schools on translation, and whose activities encompass a wide range of perspectives and languages, including Arabic, French, German, Polish, Russian, Romanian, Spanish, Turkish, and Urdu. Their discussion will reflect on how the move online during the Covid-19 pandemic has generated new ways of working, new opportunities for collaboration, and new resources accessible for teachers.
This event is aimed at teachers of languages across primary and secondary schools, Key Stages 2-5, covering both Modern Foreign Languages and work with learners who have English as an Additional Language. It will also appeal to librarians, educators and all who are interested in translation for children. Participants will learn about some of the major initiatives being led in schools to promote multilingualism and intercultural awareness, and gain ideas and new digital resources for their teaching practice.
Speakers:

Sarah Ardizzone is an award-winning translator from French. Co-founder of Translators in Schools, the Stephen Spender Trust’s flagship education programme, Sarah also consults for its Creative Translation in the Classroom programme. She is a long-term contributor to Pop Up Festivals, including the forthcoming Pop Up Festival of Multilingual Literature.
Gitanjali Patel is a translator, social researcher and co-founder of Shadow Heroes. This organisation explores translation as a social justice practice in schools workshops and training for translators.
Greet Pauwelijn is a linguist, translator and founder of Book Island, an independent publisher known for its beautifully-illustrated and thought-provoking picture books from around the world.
Charlotte Ryland is Director of the Stephen Spender Trust, a charity whose mission includes promoting literary translation and multilingualism. The Trust is currently co-curating the forthcoming Pop Up Festival of Multilingual Literature. She founded the Queen’s College Translation Exchange in 2018, with the aim of bringing multilingual creativity and culture to people of all ages, in particular to inspire young language-learners to continue with their studies through GCSE, A Level and beyond.

Chair:

Clémentine Beauvais is an award-winning writer for children and young adults in French, and a literary translator from English to French. She is Senior Lecturer in English in Education at the University of York.

This event is part of an ongoing seminar series on translation for children led by the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing in partnership with Outside in World. To be kept updated on the series, register your interest here.

Visualising the Database: Early Modern Women's Complaint Poetry Index
2021-10-28 17:00 - 18:00
The CBCP is pleased to host this talk by Michelle O’Callaghan and Jake Arthur introducing the new online database of Early Modern Women’s Complaint Poetry
This online event is free and open to all. Please register your interest to receive the Zoom link here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/181636629047
Michelle O’Callaghan is Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Reading. Her most recent book Crafting Poetry Anthologies in Renaissance England: Early Modern Cultures of Recreation (Cambridge, 2020) builds on her digital edition, Verse Miscellanies Online, co-edited with Alice Eardley, and is a study of the craft of making printed poetry anthologies published in the second half of the sixteenth century in England, showing how these anthologies helped to shape recreational cultures within the nation’s households, drawing men and women together from across the social classes.
Jake Arthur is a DPhil candidate and Clarendon Scholar at Oxford University. His thesis examines early modern women’s work in translation and paraphrase and seeks to reclaim the expressive and intellectual possibilities of ‘derivative’ works. The preliminary title of the thesis is ‘“The stuffe not ours”: the work of derivation in women’s writing, 1560–c.1664’. In collaboration with Sarah C. E. Ross, he is co-editor of the poetry section of the forthcoming Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing. With Rosalind Smith, he has co-authored a chapter in Early Modern Women and Complaint: Gender, Form and Politics (2020) which considers the implications of digital resources for the traditional first-line index in relation to early modern women’s complaint poetry. He works as a researcher on the ARC funded project Marginalia and the Early Modern Woman Writer, and on the ARC and Marsden funded project, Woe is She: Early Modern Women and the Poetry of Complaint.

Expanding the design canon: fresh perspectives on women in type and publishing
2021-11-10 18:30 - 20:30
We are delighted to collaborate with the St Bride Foundation to celebrate recent contributions to the field of graphic design history, which seek to shake established narratives to expand the design canon. Our panel of speakers will share their thoughts on the imperative to reconsider women’s depiction in received design histories, and will highlight some past and present contributions by women to the fields of type, graphic design and publishing. The evening will also feature the launch of an exciting new website comprising a visualisation of the findings of the ‘Women in Type’ Leverhulme Trust funded project.
Invited Guest Speakers:
Martha Scotford
‘Research and Distribution: What Worked for Me’
Briar Levit
‘Reorienting Approaches to Disseminating Design Histories’
Rathna Ramanathan
‘Tara Books: Working with Marginalised Voices Across Cultures’
‘Women in Type’ project speakers:
Fiona Ross, Alice Savoie & Mathieu Triay
‘Women in Type: highlighting the contribution of women to type history
On-line event via Zoom. Book on url below

PiCoBoo: A Research Project and an Open-Access Database
2021-11-11 17:00 - 18:00
Dr Francesca Tancini, University of Newcastle
PiCoBoo: a research project and an open-access database
This online event is free and open to all. Please register your interest to receive the Zoom link here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/181636629047
The PiCoBoo project aims to assess the significance of 19th-century European picturebooks, printed in colour for children, as a catalyst for major cultural and social changes.
It makes accessible a large corpus of picturebooks, so far dispersed across countries and institutions, only partially retrievable through local catalogues, not always correctly described and in a not-uniformed way. The database now provides almost 600 books, with hundreds of digitised images included and not retrievable elsewhere on the web.
PiCoBoo project has been hosted by the Children’s Literature Unit at Newcastle University, in partnership with Seven Stories, The National Centre for Children’s Books, and with the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Tracing the Nigerian Civil War through Heinemann's African Writers Series archives: an undergraduate research project and its afterlife
2021-11-18 17:00 - 18:00
Dr Sue Walsh and Ms Temiloluwa Ogdugbesan
Tracing the Nigerian Civil War through Heinemann’s African Writers Series archives: an undergraduate research project and its afterlife
This online event is free and open to all. Please register your interest to receive the Zoom link here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/182683369877
As is well known, Heinemann Educational Books’ African Writers Series was particularly significant for the development of postcolonial literature in Africa and when the series was first established in 1962, Nigerian authors, including its editorial adviser Chinua Achebe, were among its most significant contributors. But, when in 1967, civil war broke out as the south-eastern part of Nigeria (Biafra) attempted to secede from the rest of the country, Heinemann was left in a potentially difficult position; publishing a significant number of authors from the secessionist side of the conflict (including Achebe himself) whilst trying to maintain its offices in the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
This summer I supervised an undergraduate research project funded by the University of Reading, in which a second-year student, Temiloluwa Odugbesan, conducted research into where and how the civil war was discussed in the papers of the publishers (held in the Heinemann archives at the University of Reading’s Special Collections) during the civil war period (1967-70). The purpose of the project was two-fold: 1) to conduct some initial research that would support my longer term research into how Heinemann handled the implications of the civil war for its business in Nigeria; 2) to introduce undergraduate students and others not familiar with the AWS archives to them, through the production of a short series of blogs and an online exhibition to be hosted on the University of Reading’s Special Collections website.
This is the story of that research project, what Temiloluwa found and how she put together an engaging set of blogs and a fascinating online exhibition intended to introduce people to some of the greats of Nigerian literature, to the African Writers Series Archives, and to give some brief background to the civil war and its implications for the publishers at Heinemann and their authors.
Sue Walsh
I’m a lecturer in the Department of English Literature at the University of Reading. My original specialism is in children’s literature and theory and I am a member of the Graduate Centre for International Research in Childhood: Literature, Culture, Media, and I have published a monograph in this area (Kipling’s Children’s Literature: Language, Identity and Constructions of Childhood, was published in 2010 by Ashgate)
More recently however, having been born in New Bussa in north-western Nigeria in 1967, I have always been interested in Nigerian literature and particularly in the literature of the civil war period. I teach a third year module in Nigerian prose literature (from Achebe to Adichie) and have become more and more engrossed in archival work, looking into what Heinemann’s papers can tell us about this period and its impact on the authors and publishers.
Temiloluwa Odugbesan
I’m a current 3rd Year Spanish and Economics BA student and, during the summer of my second year, I undertook a unique research project ‘Tracing the Nigerian Civil war through Heinemann’s African Writers Series’.
My name is Temiloluwa and I am one of the Nigerian speakers for this event, which you may have been able to tell by my devastatingly wonderful name. I look forward to sharing my research project with you because not only is it relevant but also because the African Writers Series holds a special place in my heart as it celebrates Nigerian literature alongside many other great works. Growing up I have always appreciated literature and to explore it from an indigenous perspective this past summer has been amazing, you truly get to see how every writer has their story.
Furthermore, through understanding the context this adds to the ambience and feel of the writers – more to come in the talk!

David King: Authoring the Visual Narrative by Design
2021-11-25 17:00 - 18:00
Professor Rick Poynor
David King: Authoring the Visual Narrative by Design
This event is free and open to all. This research seminar will be a hybrid event, taking place on the University of Reading campus, Edith Morley Building Room G74 and online. Please register your interest to receive the Zoom link here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/182700621477
David King (1942-2016) occupies an unusual position in British graphic design and publishing. At the Sunday Times Magazine, where he worked for 10 years, he was both a designer and a visual journalist, developing, researching and sometimes photographing his own stories. In 1972, he co-authored his first book, about Trotsky, and he went on to build up a world-class private collection of graphics and photographs from the Russian revolutionary period (now owned by Tate), which he used in his own work. As an expert visual researcher with an ever-developing command of the subject, he designed and authored a range of catalogues and books about Russian and Soviet history, among them The Commissar Vanishes (1997), Ordinary Citizens (2003) and Red Star Over Russia (2009). King was a leading example of “the designer as author”, able to conceive and construct visual narratives that would never be attempted by text-led historians or designers who lacked his deep historical knowledge. This talk will trace the development of King’s visual practice as an author, consider the visual signature he derived from constructivism, and assess the combination of visual and editorial skills that enabled his publishing projects. What are the implications of King’s body of work for a more complex form of visual authorship?
Rick Poynor is Professor of Design and Visual Culture at the University of Reading. He was the founding editor of Eye, the international review of graphic design, and co-founder of the Design Observer website. His most recent books are David King: Designer, Activist, Visual Historian (Yale University Press, 2020) and National Theatre Posters: A Design History (Unit Editions, 2017). His other books include Obey the Giant: Life in the Image World (2001), No More Rules: Graphic Design and Postmodernism (2003) and Jan van Toorn: Critical Practice (2008). Occasional Papers will publish Graphic Cultures, his fourth volume of essays, in 2022.

Poetry & Money: A Speculation
2022-01-20 17:00 - 18:30
Professor Peter Robinson, Department of English Literature, University of Reading
This event is free and open to all. This research seminar will be a hybrid event, taking place on the University of Reading campus, Palmer Building Room G02 and online. Please register your interest to receive the Zoom link here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/poetry-money-a-speculation-tickets-228788541687
Poetry & Money: A Speculation (Liverpool University Press, 2020) is a study of relationships between poets, poetry, and money from Chaucer to contemporary times. It explores how trust is essential to the creation of value in human exchange, and how money can, depending on conditions, both enable and disable trustfully collaborative generations of value. Drawing upon a vast range of poetry for its exemplifications, the book includes studies of poetic hardship, religious verse and debt redeeming, the economic revolution, debates over metallic and paper currency in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as modernist struggles with the gold standard, depression, inflation, and the realised groundlessness of exchange value.
For his presentation of work from this book, Peter Robinson will concentrate on two sections inspired by materials held in Special Collections at the University of Reading, namely documents connected with the publication of Translations from the Night by Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo in the Heinemann African Writers series, and an anonymous Jacobite Ode on the South Sea Bubble.
Peter Robinson was born in Salford, Lancashire, in 1953, and grew up mainly in Liverpool. He holds degrees from the universities of York and Cambridge. Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Reading and poetry editor for Two Rivers Press, he is the author of many books, especially of poetry and translation, for some of which he has been awarded the Cheltenham Prize, the John Florio Prize, and two Poetry Book Society Recommendations.
This research seminar will be a hybrid event, taking place online and on the University of Reading campus, room G02, Palmer Building http://www.reading.ac.uk/web/files/maps/whiteknights-campus-map.pdf (Building number 26 on this map).

Experimental publishing and new archival initiatives
2022-01-27 17:00 - 19:00
Experimental publishing and new archival initiatives
This online event is free and open to all. Please register your interest to receive the Zoom link here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/experimental-publishing-and-new-archival-initiatives-tickets-228856103767
This panel is the second in a series of events, which draw on historical as well as contemporary references to examine experimental publishing through a range of perspectives, spanning the fields of art, communication design, digital media and software development. This event looks specifically at the ways in which archival initiatives in experimental, grassroots publishing have extended relationships between social and media environments over the past decade. Looking at three specific practitioner-led case studies, the presentations and the subsequent Q&A will consider the breakdown of strict boundaries between activities of publishing and archiving, enabled through the development of new forms of networked, social interactions, and the hybridization of digital and analog contexts. In particular, these case studies will point to convergences between technical and social phenomena which have challenged the status-quo and offered new imaginaries through the availability of cheap and accessible technologies (both hardware and software) to design, produce, distribute and simultaneously archive publications; significant developments in the open source software movement; and the cross-reference to specific ideas from feminist and queer cultural theory, as well as cyberfeminism. This event will contribute to the overall aims of the Experimental Publishing series by highlighting again the importance of new, cross-disciplinary vocabularies to enter traditional discourses in order to adequately further scholarship around experimental and grassroots practices in the publishing field.
Convened by Ruth Blacksell and Lozana Rossenova with contributions from Simon Browne, Ami Clarke and Mindy Seu. The case study presentations include The Bootleg Library, the Digital Archive of Artists’ Publishing, and The Cyberfeminism Index.
Dr Ruth Blacksell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading. She leads the Book Design Pathway for the Department’s MA in Communication Design. Her PhD (2013) at the University of Sheffield’s School of Architecture was supported by a concordat scholarship with the British Library and she recently established a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership between the University of Reading and Tate Library. Much of her research to date has been concerned with typographic engagements and acts of publishing in post-1960s art and the emergence of a contemporary inter-disciplinary territory which, following this historical and theoretical lineage, utilises and exploits the vocabularies and contexts of both art and editorial design.
Simon Browne is an artist, researcher and self-proclaimed “contingent librarian”, convenient shorthand for an ever-expanding list of actions he performs in his practice. Simon is the initiator of the “bootleg library”, a digital/physical/social collection of texts and the readers collected around them. His work engages with the social dimension of publishing, free software and infrastructure that supports interpersonal knowledge-sharing networks. He lives and works in Rotterdam, where he is active as a member of Varia, a collective-space for everyday technology.
Ami Clarke is an artist working within the emergent behaviours that come off the complex protocols of platform capitalism in everyday assemblages, with a focus on the inter-dependencies between code and language in hyper-networked culture. She is interested in acknowledging, and thinking through, the complexities of the subject emerging in synthesis with their environment, from a critical intersectional position. She is also founder of Banner Repeater; a reading room with a public Archive of Artists’ Publishing and project space on a working train station platform at Hackney Downs station, London. She is also the initiator and artistic director of the Digital Archive of Artists’ Publishing, an online platform that seeks to connect publications and artists across collections.
Lozana Rossenova is a digital designer and researcher. She holds an MA from the Department for Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading, where she was a Sessional Lecturer in hybrid and digital publication between 2016–2021. In 2021, she completed a PhD at the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image (London South Bank University) in collaboration with Rhizome, a leading international born-digital art organisation. Her research focuses on open-source and community-driven approaches to digital infrastructures, which organise, store and make knowledge, and different ways of knowing, accessible.
Mindy Seu is a designer and researcher currently writing the manuscript for the Cyberfeminism Index, to be released by Inventory Press in Fall 2022. She holds an M.Des from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and a B.A. in Design Media Arts from University of California, Los Angeles. Seu is currently an Assistant Professor at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts and Critic at Yale School of Art.
Credits: The image background uses a source photo from the Banner Repeater instagram account.

Ed Fella: Exit Level Design, 1985–2012
2022-01-31 - 2022-03-25
Exhibition: Ed Fella: Exit Level Design, 1985–2012 curated by Rick Poynor. Monday 31 January – Friday 25 March 2022, Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, ToB2, Earley Gate.
The American graphic designer Edward Fella’s career divides into two complementary phases. For 30 years, Fella (born 1938) worked as a designer, commercial artist and illustrator in Detroit, Michigan. In his late 40s, hoping to teach, he gained a first degree in graphic design and studied for an MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art, then a centre of theoretical thinking and experimental graphic practice. In the second phase of his career – the focus of this exhibition – Fella became, as he put it, an “exit level designer”, leaving clients and commissions behind to teach at California Institute of the Arts and pursue a freewheeling investigation of form unique in contemporary graphic design. After years of professional studio experience, Fella was a master of diverse graphic styles and hand-lettering. Work that might at first glance seem neglectful of design’s cardinal “rules” came from a deep well of knowledge. He created flyers for lectures by himself and other designers that are loaded with allusions. In his sketchbooks, he produced a daily stream of collages and drawings best understood as art about design. In his 50s, Fella became internationally famous for a self-motivated body of work that overflows with invention and surprise.
Credit: Flyer designed by Ed Fella

Read the World: Picture Books and Translation
2022-02-03 17:00 - 18:00
Read the World: Picture Books and Translation
This event is free and open to all. This research seminar will be online. Please register your interest to receive the Zoom link here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/x/read-the-world-picture-books-and-translation-tickets-251121821127
The Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing in partnership with Outside in World, the organisation dedicated to promoting and exploring world literature and children’s books in translation, are delighted to announce the latest event in their seminar series on translation for children:
Read the World: Picture Books and Translation
A Reading Library Exhibition at The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art (Amherst, MA)
The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book’s current library exhibition “Read the World: Picture Books and Translation” highlights the role of translators, showcases multilingual books, and introduces readers to recent English translations and their publishers.
Join Professor Regina Galasso (UMass Amherst), Caroline Seitz (Amherst College), Education Director Courtney Waring (The Carle) and Literacy Educator David Feinstein (The Carle) as they share themes and highlights from the exhibition, and discuss their process curating and creating interpretive materials for young readers.
Participants:
David Feinstein (The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art)
Regina Galasso (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Caroline Seitz (Amherst College)
Courtney Waring (The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art)
Credits: Sonja Wimmer, Illustration for The Day Saida Arrived written by Susana Gómez Redondo and translated by Lawrence Schimel (Blue Dot Kids Press). © 2020 Sonja Wimmer.

Researching the history of printing in Iran: particularities and challenges
2022-02-24 17:00 - 18:30
Dr Borna Izadpanah , Department of Typography, University of Reading
This event is free and open to all. This research seminar will be a hybrid event, taking place on the University of Reading campus, Typography Department, Room A6, and online. Please register your interest to receive the Zoom link here:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/researching-the-history-of-printing-in-iran-particularities-and-challenges-tickets-242664866147
This seminar introduces some of the particularities and challenges that Borna’s recently completed PhD research faced in developing the chapter that deals with the introduction of Arabic-script printing to nineteenth-century Iran. One of the significant aspects of Arabic-script metal types produced in Iran is their extremely minimal use. This is also true of the number of surviving copies of the early Persian publications in Iran which were printed with those types. For example, the first Qurʾān printed with both typography (1827) and lithography (1834) are limited to two identified copies. Additionally, the condition of extant copies of books printed in Iran during this period are often extremely poor and, in many cases, incomplete.
This presentation demonstrates Borna’s experience of investigating the early Persian publications in Iran, which shows that many of these publications have yet to be identified. As will be shown, the discovery of previously unknown publications in libraries or private collections – which is not an infrequent occurrence – often overturns the received history of printing in Iran.
Borna Izadpanah is a typeface designer and researcher based in London. He holds a PhD in Typography & Graphic Communication from the University of Reading, where he also graduated with an MA in Typeface Design. His doctoral research explored the history of the early typographic representation of the Persian language. Borna has received numerous prestigious awards for his research and typeface design including the Grand Prize and the First Prize in Arabic Text Typeface in Granshan Type Design Competition, TDC Certificate of Typographic Excellence, and the Symposia Iranica Prize for the best paper in Art History.
This research seminar will be a hybrid event, taking place online and on the University of Reading campus, Room A6, Typography Department http://www.reading.ac.uk/web/files/maps/whiteknights-campus-map.pdf (Building number 21 on this map).

Five go to France.... and are translated back again
2022-03-10 17:00 - 18:00
An online panel event with the editor and translator to mark the publication of Hachette’s new Famous Five graphic novel series. Register here

About this event

Speakers:
Alexandra Antscherl (Editorial Director, Enid Blyton Entertainment and Fiction Brands at Hachette Children’s Group)
Emma D. Page (Translator, PhD student at the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing, University of Reading)
Chair:
Sophie Heywood (Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing, University of Reading)
The panel will explore the new Famous Five series retold as graphic novels for the first time ever. The series translates back into English the French adaptation of Blyton’s novels by Béja and Nataël, a talented father-and-son team of graphic novel experts. Together the speakers will discuss the French and English books, the translation process, and publishing Blyton in the 21st century. This will be followed by a Q&A.

Conference - Inside and Outside Modernism: An Anatomy of 1922 and its Cultures
2022-03-28 | University of Reading, London Road Campus
Monday 28th March 2022
“James Joyce is quite wrong headed. Anyhow, with his wilfulness, he has made novel reading into a fair imitation of penal servitude…” (ARNOLD BENNETT on ULYSSES)
Keynote Speakers: Professor Patrick Collier (Ball State University), Dr Beci Carver (University of Exeter)
This one-day conference intends to examine 1922 looking at the cultures and writers associated with this significant year, in all their forms and geographical spread. It will consider the year holistically, considering cultural and personal interactions and how they relate to the intellectual work of modernism. The conference is designed to bring the year into clearer focus with interdisciplinary contributions from politics, history, science, economics, music, literature, book history and visual culture and areas that have fallen outside the purview of traditional modernism. Some questions the conference would like to approach include: how has modernism impacted on the study of artistic cultures? How far did recent history shape social attitudes? How did the political and economic uncertainties in 1922 permeate different cultures? Was 1922 important for anything more than modernism itself?
Panels:

Ephemeral Modernism
Poetry and Performance
High Modernism
Publishing and Trade

Other highlights include:

University of Reading Special Collection and Archive exhibition of materials
The Handheld Press will showcase a selection of texts for attendees to browse and purchase on the day

The conference will take place in-person at the University of Reading, London Road Campus, with some blended panels. Please note that the schedule is subject to change according to University COVID-19 guidance and advice. We will inform all speakers and attendees of any changes in advance of the conference as soon as possible.
Registration is free but places are limited and will be available on a first come, first served basis. Lunch and refreshments will be available to purchase on-site. Register here.
If you have any questions, please contact the organisers, Benjamin Bruce (b.bruce@pgr.reading.ac.uk) and Domonique Davies (domonique.davies@pgr.reading.ac.uk)
Supported by the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing and the Samuel Beckett Research Centre at University of Reading.

Adaptation Student Showcase and Masterclass
2022-04-29 13:00 - 16:30 | Bob Kayley Theatre Space, Minghella Building, Whiteknights Campus
Featuring: A showcase of creative adaptations across stage and screen including live performances, audio experiences, film excerpts, and production files created by student artists from Film, Theatre and Television, curated by Dr Sarah Bartley (University of Reading); Head of Fundraising, Edd Pickering (University of Reading) presents the latest Cine Valley developments; topped off with an Adaptation masterclass with award-winning author Robin Mukherjee (Bath Spa University).
Robin Mukherjee has written extensively for television, radio, theatre and film. He has also written a book on screenwriting and a novel. His first feature film, ‘Dance of the Wind’, won the Audience Prize at the London Film Festival. His most recent feature, ‘Lore’, has won numerous awards world-wide and was Australia’s official entry to the Oscars. His three part television series, ‘Combat Kids’ was nominated for a BAFTA.

Writing Classy Places: Creative writing workshop at Reading Central Library with Lisa Blower
2022-05-19 17:30 - 18:45 | Reading Central Library, Abbey Square, Reading, Berkshire, RG1 3BQ
Part of ‘Class in Publishing and Print’
Writing Classy Places
Join prize winning author Lisa Blower for a creative writing workshop on how to draw class into place and create places because of class. Lisa will discuss her own fiction and offer personal tips on how to generate believable settings and the lives within them.

This is a free event, but places are limited. Please register here to book your place.

Bio:
Lisa Blower is a prize-winning short story writer and novelist. She won the Arnold Bennett Prize in 2020 for It’s Gone Dark over Bill’s Mother’s – a collection of stories that draws from her Potteries childhood and the chattering of matriarchs she grew up with. She is the author of 2 novels – Sitting Ducks (2016) which was shortlisted for The Rubery, the Guardian’s Not the Booker and the People’s Book Prize, and Pondweed (2020), a road trip in the slow lane from Stoke to Snowdon via pints, pitches, and pit stops. She won The Guardian’s National Short Story Competition in 2009, has been shortlisted for the BBC Short Story award, The Sunday Times Short Story Prize, and The Bridport Prize. She holds a PhD in Creative & Critical Writing and is Programme Leader & Senior Lecturer in Creative & Professional Writing at Wolverhampton University.

Class in Publishing and Print: ceilings, inequalities, diversities
2022-05-20 10:00 - 16:30 | University of Reading, London Road Campus
CBCP Annual Conference
This conference at the University of Reading brings together academics, writers, publishers and agents to explore the relationships between publishing genres, printing, national and regional diversity, readers, business decisions and social class.
Registration is free but places are limited and will be available on a first come, first served basis. Click here to book your place.
Keynote Speakers:

Professor Katy Shaw, Northumbria University
Lisa Blower, author
Natasha Carthew, writer and founder of Working Class Writers Festival
Emma Shercliff, literary agent
Professor Dave O’Brien, University of Sheffield

Social class has long been a barrier for writers from working-class backgrounds to getting into print. From D. H. Lawrence to James Kelman, Buchi Emecheta to Pat Barker, working-class writers have been told to edit and revise dialect, style and characters to get their work published in the literary mainstream.
Thanks to austerity policies and the erosion of the welfare state, barriers to entry in the creative industries are higher than ever (see Panic! Social Class, Taste and Inequalities in the Creative Industries by Brook, O’Brien and Taylor, 2018). Prompted by today’s inequalities and the systemic barriers to entry in the cultural and creative industries, interest in contemporary working-class writing is at a high and publishers are trying to address the “class ceilings” and regional biases in their own workforces.
The conference will take place in-person with one online panel. Please note that the schedule is subject to change according to University COVID-19 guidance and advice. We will inform all speakers and attendees of any changes in advance of the conference as soon as possible.
For the full programme and further details see here: Class in Publishing and Print Conference Document_NW BEST (1)

Leverhulme Lecture: The Arcade in Arcadia - Thomas Bewick, Children’s Books, and Rural Readers in Enlightenment England
2022-05-26 13:00 - 14:00 | Museum of English Rural Life, 6 Redlands Road, Reading, Berkshire, RG1 5EX, United Kingdom
Join Professor Kristin Bluemel, Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Newcastle University, as she explores the work of eighteenth-century artist, writer, and naturalist Thomas Bewick. This talk will explore the ways in which Bewick’s illustrations and the appeal of his work to children were fundamental in establishing nineteenth-century ideas of the rural. Famous for wood engraved books of natural history—especially the two volume A History of British Birds—Bewick won the hearts of children with his tail-pieces (“tale-pieces”) of rural life, which appeared in the white spaces at the ends of his book chapters. The talk will be accompanied by a short tour led by Curator of MERL Collections, Dr Ollie Douglas.
Professor Bluemel’s Leverhulme project puts the rural back at the heart of our thinking about culture, and develops the emerging, interdisciplinary field of ‘rural humanities’.
Bewick’s work invites us to consider how people in the past cared for their natural and human heritage. It highlights the importance of creativity in shaping how we respond to a changing world.
This event is a collaboration between CBCP and the Museum of English Rural Life. It will take place at the MERL. Registration is free and open to all, but spaces are limited. Please register here.

Image: Thomas Bewick vignette at the end of the introduction to “The Predatory Gulls” section in A History of British Birds, Vol. II, Water Birds, first published 1804. Child readers would have noticed the lost hat, whose replacement will take more out of the damp traveller’s pocket than any toll. This image is from the 1826 edition, p. 228.

Poetry Workshop at Reading Central Library: Embodied Imagery with Golnoosh Nourpanah
2022-05-28 11:00 - 12:30 | Reading Central Library, Abbey Square, Reading, Berkshire, RG1 3BQ
Part of ‘Class in Publishing and Print’
‘Her hair was like golden sunlight.’ ‘The child was quiet as a mouse.’ ‘He was caught red-handed.’
How many times have you been put off by a clichéd image, simile, or metaphor like these examples? Good poems make readers feel something rather than just impart information. This is not always easy as unlike other artforms, in poetry, language is the primary medium. How can we make the familiar seem fresh, embodied, and authentic? How can we use language in a way to have the maximum effect on the reader, to make the reader feel something and think for themselves, rather than just telling them what to think? Learn to make the readers visualise your poems. Let them feel your words, not just hear them.
In this workshop we learn to create images that are authentic and unique to us, with just our use of language. In this workshop, we learn how to avoid reproducing clichés and create images that are strong, memorable, and authentic.
This is a free event, but places are limited. Click here to book your ticket.
Bio:

Golnoosh Nourpanah is a published poet, prose writer, and lecturer. In 2019, she earned a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from Birkbeck, University of London. Golnoosh has authored two poetry collections and a short story collection, which was shortlisted for the Polari Prize 2021. She has taught creative writing at Birkbeck, UEL, the Poetry School, the University of Bedfordshire, the University of Reading and Westminster, and she’s performed her poetry in literature festivals and events across the UK and internationally.

CBCP Postgraduate Study Day Friday 1st July: Programme
2022-07-01
The Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing (CBCP) is pleased to share the programme for next Friday’s first PhD Study Day.
This has been organised and convened by doctoral researchers working on areas relevant to the CBCP. It is a free event, with lunch provided: all are welcome to attend!
9:45 – 10:00 Meetup – Edith Morley 125
10:00 – 10:10 Introduction
Panel 1 10:10 – 11:25
Matthew Chambers (CBCP Visiting Research Fellow), ‘Locating the Modernist Bookshop in the Archive’;
Benjamin Bruce (DEL) ‘A tale of two tales: Ideology aesthetics and publishing at Chatto & Windus in 1922’;
Jenny Harper (DEL) ‘Censorship in the writing of the working classes: Ethel Carnie Holdsworth and John Clare’
11:25 – 11:40 Coffee break
Panel 2 11:40 – 12:30
Stephanie Alder (CBCP Early Careers Fellow) ‘New Boxes Come Across the Sea’: Exploring the Transnational Victorian Library;
Andrea De Falco (DLC) ‘New books for a new public: charting the paperback revolution in the Italian cultural industry (1945-1965)’
12:30 – 1:30 Lunch break
Panel 3 1:30 – 2:15
Lisa Barnard (Art) ‘A Body of Citational Writing’;
Antonio Gambacorta (DEL) ‘Samuel Beckett and the making of Still: con tre acqueforti’
2:15 – 2:25 Short break
Panel 4 2:25 – 3:15
Claudia R. Amenos (Typography) ‘Letterpress political posters of the Spanish Second Republic and the Spanish Civil War (1931–39)’;
Ring Yong (Typography) ‘Typographical variation in Chinese print: Missionaries, metal type and printing press in late imperial China (1813-1860)’;
Isabel Stoole (Typography) ‘Connotations of gender in 20th-century print production advertisements, with focus on images depicting the employment of women (1945–1985)’
We look forward to seeing you!

Exhibition - invitation to private viewing: 'Looking at women looking at themselves being looked at: Female representation in Charles Mozley’s work'
2022-07-22 18:00 - 19:30
You are cordially invited to attend a private viewing of the exhibition
Looking at women looking at themselves being looked at Female representation in Charles Mozley’s work
Curated by Cătălina Zlotea
Friday, 22 July 20226 pm to 7.30 pm Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of ReadingTOB2Whiteknights RoadEarley GateReading, RG6 6BZ(Sat nav RG6 7BE)
This new exhibition explores the concept of the male gaze in twentieth-century illustration. Cătălina Zlotea, a PhD researcher, analyses the work of the prolific mid-century British illustrator Charles Mozley (1914–1991) through a contemporary lens. At a moment when gender dynamics still define a perpetual cycle of inequality, this show explores how feminine stereotypes have been constructed and perpetuated in British visual culture.
The exhibition is open until 9 September, on weekdays from 10 am to 5 pm. Closed bank holidays.
Please RSVP before 17 July: c.c.zlotea@pgr.reading.ac.uk

A Room of One's Own on the High Street: Women and Personal Bookshops, 1916-1939
2022-10-13 17:00 - 18:00
Dr Matt Chambers, CBCP Research Fellow

This research seminar is free and open to all. Join us in person in the Edith Morley Building, Room G74. To join via Zoom, register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/423971097967

From 1916 onwards, a new form of bookselling became progressively more visible. Variously labelled “personal bookshops” or “bookshop salons,” small bookselling businesses, opened and operated often by women, offered a different kind of retail experience. Stock was tailored to fit a certain theme or vision; the shop was imagined as a social space and could hold events; the owners would publish books, periodicals, and pamphlets which became synonymous with the shop; and in general, the bookshop became the centre of a literary or political community. In reviewing The Sunwise Turn and the Harlem People’s Book Shop (New York City), as well as Bermondsey Books and Collet’s (London), and Shakespeare and Company and Les Maison des Amis des Livres (Paris), I will discuss how more than just a notable demographic shift, these women-led bookshops represented a change in what was possible in book retail, and permanently altered the bookselling landscape in the early twentieth century.

Book Launch: The Women Who Invented Twentieth-Century Children’s Literature
2022-11-17 17:00 - 18:30 | Edith Morley G44
Join us for a hybrid in-person/online event to mark the publication of The Women Who Invented Twentieth-Century Children’s Literature: Only the Best (Routledge: Children’s Literature and Culture Series), by Elizabeth West, CBCP Early Career Research Fellow.
This event is free and open to all. Join us in the Edith Morley Building, Room G44, to be followed by drinks at Park House. To register for the Zoom link, click here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/424176642757
Publishing for children between 1930 and 1960 has been denigrated as a relatively fallow period for creativity and quality, certainly in comparison with the ‘golden ages’ of children’s literature that preceded and succeeded it. This book questions this perception by using archival evidence to argue that the work of what was predominantly a female group of editors, illustrators, authors and librarians (collectively referred to as bookwomen) resulted in many titles which are still considered as ‘classics’ today. The bookwomen reframed ideas about how children’s publishing should be approached and valued and, in doing so, laid the foundations for a subsequent generation of children’s authors and publishers who were to achieve far greater prominence. The key to the success of the bookwomen was their willingness to experiment, the strength of their relationships, and their comprehensive understanding of the book production process. By focusing on a selection of women working across all aspects of the book production process, this book demonstrates that, both individually and collectively, women capitalised on their position as ‘other’ to the existing male institutions.

Spaces of Translation: European Magazine Cultures, c. 1945-1965
2022-12-08 17:00 - 18:30
Speakers: Andrew Thacker (Nottingham Trent) and Alison E. Martin (Mainz/Germersheim)
This research seminar is free and open to all. Join us in person in the Edith Morley Building, Room G74. To join via Zoom, register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/428120508967
In this project we study a small constellation of literary and cultural magazines from three countries and language areas – Britain, France and Germany – in order to consider how, through translation, they explore and construct notions of European identity in the period following from the end of World War Two to the mid-1960s. Rapid shifts towards decolonisation, the Americanisation of European culture, the rise of anti-militarism and the strategic and ideological conflicts instigated by the Cold War all stimulated an ongoing reassessment of what the European idea stood for and whether or how it might be achieved. Using the notion of periodicals as ‘European spaces’, the project addresses how periodical culture in Britain, France, and Germany used translation to reconfigure a vision for Europe after the catastrophe of World War Two. As The Gate/Das Tor declared in 1947, art, music and literature were ‘not the property of one nation alone’ and that ‘a deeper understanding of our cultural ties with Europe is a surer way to international friendship than political treaties’. But what exactly was the significance of the translation of works of poetry, fiction, criticism, and non-fiction in this period? How did translated texts operate as vehicles for the forging of new European identities? And how did the crossing of linguistic boundaries produce alliances across national borders?

Catherine Butler, 'Studio Ghibli and British Children’s Literature in Japan'
2022-12-13 17:00 - 18:00
This talk is part of the CBCP and Outside in World Webinar series on Children’s Literature and Translation.
Join us online to hear Catherine Butler (Cardiff) talking about ‘Studio Ghibli and British Children’s Literature in Japan’.
This event is free and open to all. To register for the Zoom link, click here.
Hayao Miyazaki has had a lifelong interest in British children’s literature, and an influential role in popularising it in Japan, notably through the animations he created at Studio Ghibli. In this talk I will discuss some aspects of that contribution, and that of directors whom Miyazaki directly influenced, especially his protogé, Hiromasa Yonebayashi. But I will also ask two questions: why does Hayao Miyazaki, who loves British children’s books and has adapted several, never used Britain as a setting? And what are the consequence of taking a story from one setting and medium and putting it into another?
Catherine Butler is Reader in English Literature at Cardiff University. Her academic books include Four British Fantasists (2006), Reading History in Children’s Books (with Hallie O’Donovan, 2012) and Literary Studies Deconstructed (2018), and several edited collections. Her latest book, British Children’s Literature in Japanese Culture: Wonderlands and Looking-Glasses, is due to be published by Bloomsbury in 2023. She has also published six novels for children and teenagers. Catherine is Editor-in-Chief of Children’s Literature in Education.

Anthony Glinoer, 'Between Archives and Databases. The Archives éditoriales platform.'
2023-01-12 17:00 - 18:00
Join us online to hear Anthony Glinoer (University of Sherbrooke, Quebec) talking about The Archives éditoriales platform http://archiveseditoriales.net.
This event is free and open to all. Join us in person in T4, Department of Typography and Graphic Communication. To register for the Zoom link, click here.
A presentation of the internet platform Archives éditoriales (http://archiveseditoriales.net) and of the research partnership project of francophone publishers’ archives, which made the platform possible. Amongst the tools made available on the platform (a database of more than a thousand interviews with francophone publishers about their publishing activity, digital exhibitions, a blog, etc.), Anthony will focus on the database of publishers’ archives, addressing the questions of why, how and when publishing houses tend to donate their archives to public institutions.
Anthony Glinoer is a professor at the University of Sherbrooke (Quebec). His work focusses primarily on the history of publishing (Naissance de l’Éditeur with Pascal Durand in 2005), on the study of representations of the literary life (La bohème. Une figure de l’imaginaire social in 2018) and on groups of authors and artists (L’âge des cénacles with Vincent Laisney in 2013). Anthony Glinoer has also led the Socius project, which has produced re-editions of the classics in literary social theory, re-edited or original bibliographies, and a lexicon of concepts (see the open-access site: ressources-socius.info).
(The illustration is a badge from the Prise de Parole publishing house, Sudbury, Archives of the CRCCF, Fonds Paul-François-Sylvestre (P179), M81-14, Ottawa.)

Valeria Illuminati, Roberta Pederzoli, and Beatrice Spallaccia, 'The G-Book Project. Literature for children and YAs from a gender perspective: literary and translation issues'
2023-01-25 17:00 - 18:00
This talk is part of the CBCP and Outside in World Webinar series on Children’s Literature and Translation and is open to all. To register to join us via Zoom click here.
Speakers: Valeria Illuminati, Roberta Pederzoli, and Beatrice Spallaccia (University of Bologna, MeTRa Centre – Research Centre on Mediation and Translation by and for Children and Young Adults)
The CBCP x OIW webinar series is delighted to welcome a team of speakers from the European G-Book projects. The projects G-BOOK 1 and 2 (Gender Identity: Child Readers and Library Collections and European teens as readers and creators in gender-positive narratives) aim to promote gender positive children’s and young adult literature in terms of roles and models, a literature that is open-minded, plural, varied, free from stereotypes, and that encourages respect and diversity. The first part of the webinar will develop a critical-theoretical reflection on literature for children and young adults from a gender perspective and on its translation. In particular, we will discuss:

gender representations and stereotypes
families
male and female characters
LGBTQ+ issues
and the G-BOOK European projects.

The second part will explore case studies of LGBTQ+ themed illustrated books in English and French translated into Italian. We will analyze both the paratext and the text itself, showing how in the transfer from one language and culture to another there are some shifts and changes, which are not necessarily questionable, but however present the source text in a new light and produce a different effect on the target reader.

Objects made of letters: Concrete poetry in Britain, 1963–75
2023-02-02 - 2023-03-28 | University of Reading, Whiteknights Campus, Edith Morley, G44
Exhibition curated by Rick Poynor at the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication
Open by appointment until 28 March 2023. Please contact Emma Minns for an appointment.
Based on material from the collection of the late Andrew Belsey, philosophy lecturer, concrete poet and MA graduate from Typography & Graphic Communication, “Objects made of letters” explores and illustrates concrete poetry in its heyday. The experience of a concrete poem is always visual, the meaning – in the absence of conventional poetic imagery and syntax – often elusive. The exhibition provides a survey of key publications and illuminating examples, and focuses on the output of three significant figures: Dom Sylvester Houédard, Bob Cobbing and John Furnival.
Curated by Rick Poynor, with assistance from Eric Kindel, Emma Minns and Geoff Wyeth.

Eric Kindel, 'Stencil work: scenes and themes'
2023-03-09 17:30 - 18:30
This event is free for all. Join us in Room T4 in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading. To join via Zoom register here.
This talk will survey scenes and themes of stencil work spanning six centuries, discussing and illustrating the surprising variety of uses to which stencils have been put in the production of graphic and textual documents, marks, and messages. Drawing on more than twenty years of research, the talk will explore aesthetic, technical, social, entrepreneurial, regulatory, and linguistic dimensions of stencil work, presenting scenes that are hybrid and in-between and themes that are perennial and therefore historically durable. Among the scenes will be so-called stencil “incunabula”, stencil work typical of France, Britain, and the USA, the multilingual complexities of stencil terminology, and the conundrum of stencil type and typefaces. On show will be early “cut work”, magnificent books made in monastic and secular ateliers, stencils cut by known makers and anonymous ones, depictions of stencil work across the centuries, large-scale stencil advertisements, ingenious stencil devices, and much more. The ensemble will be delivered as a sequence of visual and verbal evidence to build a synoptic presentation of this attractive domain of graphic communication.
Prof Eric Kindel is the Professor of Graphic Communication at the University of Reading. His staff profile, includes links to publications and talks.
Example publications:
Stencil: a descriptive bibliography
Delight of men and gods: Christiaan Huygens’s new method of printing
Patents progress: the Adjustable Stencil
Example talks:
Objet-type, the French stencil letter
Stencilled posters in Paris in the nineteenth century (with Pierre Pané-Farré)
Upper right image courtesy of St Bride Library, London.

Esmaeil Haddadian-Moghaddam, 'Cold Books in Hot Lands: Public and Academic Discourse on Franklin Book Programs (1952-1978)'
2023-03-23 17:00 - 18:30
This online seminar will be presented by Esmaeil Haddadian-Moghaddam, recently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions research fellow at the Universiteit Leiden, Netherlands.
This event is free and open to all. To register for the zoom link, click here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/424960617647
The various activities of the Franklin Book Programs, an American Cold War cultural diplomacy initiative for the development of indigenous publishing in the developing world and winning hearts and minds have been subject to public and academic query since its foundation in 1952. Reports and surveys of its activities, aims and objectives, and achievements have been featured in both American and non-American press, from The New York Times, Publishers Weekly to The Pakistan Observer and Al-Bilad. To exemplify the discourse, I present the story of how Franklin/New York convinced a young professor to put aside his paper but encouraged and supported the publication of another piece by a graduate student. Almost half a century later, I am asking the-now-retired-but-distinguished professor why did he oblige. This should shed some light on how Franklin/New York acted as a gatekeeper and promotor of a certain take on its operation.
Esmaeil Haddadian-Moghaddam is an independent researcher. He was until recently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions research fellow at Universiteit Leiden, Netherlands. His recent research has focused on the cultural Cold War with a focus on the activities of Franklin Book Programs in the Middle East (Coldbihot). He is the author of Literary Translation in Modern Iran: A Sociological Study (2014). He is also a managing editor of the Journal of World Literature.

Author event: Kit de Waal in conversation - in person/hybrid event
2023-05-03 18:00 - 19:30 | Van Emden Lecture Theatre, Edith Morley Building, Whiteknights Campus, University of Reading, United Kingdom
In conversation with Shelley Harris, Creative Writing programme director, Kit will be discussing her writings – both fiction and memoir – and the impact she’s had in making publishing a better place for working-class writers. This is an in person/hybrid event.
Kit de Waal is a multi-award-winning author of short stories, novels, and an autobiography. My Name is Leon (2016), her first novel, was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award. It was recently televised by the BBC, with a cast including Christopher Eccleston and Sir Lenny Henry, who also voiced the audiobook.
Kit has a passion for getting diverse voices heard. She used some of her author advance to set up the Kit de Waal Creative Writing Scholarship at Birkbeck to help improve working-class representation in the arts. It is dedicated to supporting a budding writer from a low-income household or other marginalized backgrounds. In its first year it attracted 138 applicants: this in turn, attracted other donations which has enabled the funding of additional scholarships.
She is the editor of Common People: An Anthology of Working-Class Writers (2019), the result of a project with Unbound and regional writing development organisations to feature working-class writers: this also involved mentoring and supporting new writers.
Her autobiography Without Warning & Only Sometimes – Scenes from an Unpredictable Childhood published in 2022 and was a Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4. The Guardian described it as ‘A richly observed portrait of a working-class childhood and adolescence that finds magic in the mundane’.
This is a free in person/hybrid event but everyone attending (whether in person or online) will require a ticket from Eventbrite: click here for in person; click here for online.
Questions for Kit are welcome but we request they are submitted in advance by email to cbcp@reading.ac.uk by Monday 24th April, please. This will allow Kit sufficient time to consider her answers.
