Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing

CBCP x OIW Webinar: Publishing Children’s Books in the Russia-Ukraine War: The Role of Translations
2025-12-11 17:00 - 18:30 (Europe/London)
CBCP x OIW webinar ‘Explorations in Translation for Children’ is a webinar series co-organised by The Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing (University of Reading) in partnership with Outside in World, the organisation dedicated to promoting and exploring world literature and children’s books in translation.
On Thursday 11th December at 5pm (UK time) we will be in conversation with the leaders of the project on Publishing Children’s Books in the Russia-Ukraine War: The Role of Translations.
How do children’s books cross borders in wartime and what happens to them when they do? This joint talk traces the translational lives of war-related titles from commissioning to circulation, and the challenges the publishers meet along the way. Birgitte Beck Pristed introduces the Aarhus University project “PUBLISH: Children’s Books in the Russia-Ukraine War,” examining how Ukrainian and Russian children’s publishers operate under wartime conditions and how the books reflect child readers’ experiences of war and dislocation. In this talk, she focuses on the publishers’ hurdles of bringing books across borders. Drawing on new interviews with Ukrainian publishers, Nadia Pavlyk examines how international support and solidarity are negotiated in practice, and how these transnational networks shape the capacity to produce, translate, and present war-themed children’s literature under fire. Finally, Ekaterina Shatalova shows how, in Russia’s “hybrid” censorship environment, translated children’s books become politically charged objects: the same titles can function as cultural solidarity while being securitised as “threats.” Together, the speakers argue that translation is double-edged – both a vehicle of ethical resistance and a liability within contested information regimes.

To join via MS Teams, please register here.
Speakers:
Birgitte Beck Pristed is Associate Professor at the Department of Global Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark. She is PI of the 2024-2027 research project ‘PUBLISH: Children’s Books in the Russia-Ukraine war,’ https://projects.au.dk/publish.
Nadiia Pavlyk is a researcher on the projects “PUBLISH: Children’s literature in Russia-Ukraine War” (Aarhus University, Denmark) and MSCA4Ukraine “DaR:UA. Dialogues and Reading. Shared Reading for Ukrainian Young People” (2025-2027), https://projects.au.dk/darua. She is a professor at Zhytomyr Ivan Franko State University (Ukraine) and a member of the Pool of European Youth Researchers (PEYR). Her main research areas focus on youth policy, youth work, and non-formal education.
Ekaterina Shatalova is a prolific translator of children’s books and TV shows. She holds a Master’s degree in Victorian Literature from the University of Oxford and an Erasmus Mundus International Master’s degree in Children’s Literature, Media and Culture from the University of Glasgow, University of Tilburg, and Aarhus University (2022). She is currently a PhD fellow at Aarhus University as part of the joint project “PUBLISH: Children’s Books in the Russia-Ukraine War.”

Global Perspectives on Lithographic Printing Symposium, 5-6 March 2026
2026-03-05 09:30 - 2026-03-06 15:45 | Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading (Whiteknights Campus), 2 Earley Gate, RG6 6BZ, United Kingdom
Building on Michael Twyman’s pioneering scholarship, this symposium will explore lithography as a truly global medium. It will consider lithography’s circulation across borders and oceans, its adaptation to diverse linguistic, artistic, and commercial contexts, and its embeddedness in cultural and political life from the nineteenth century onward.
The symposium includes invited papers, demonstrations on a reconstructed Senefelder Pole Press and sessions featuring material from University of Reading and private collections. It is in hybrid format for the papers only & is free and open to all.
In-person attendees please note: We are able to support 20 in-person places for the workshop & collections sessions. To join us in person, please email Beatty Hallas at b.r.hallas@reading.ac.uk (Places are limited, so will be allocated in order of application)
The venue for the symposium on both days is the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading (Whiteknights Campus), RG6 6BZ.
Online attendees please note: The symposium will run over two days, with separate MS Teams links for each day. To attend both days, please make sure you register using both of the links below.

To join us via MS Teams on 5 March 2026, please register here
To join us via MS Teams on 6 March 2026, please register here

PROGRAMME
Thursday, 5 March

9.30—10.00
Coffee & registration

10.00—10.15
Welcome & opening remarks

10.15—11.30
Session 1: Early Lithography in Islamic & Scribal Cultures (HYBRID)
Borna Izadpanah Script, stone, and type: visual continuities in Iran’s earliest printed Qurʼans
Wei Jin Darryl Lim Lithography at Riau’s “Gateway to Mecca”
(Chair: TBC)

11.30—12.00
Coffee break (provided)

12.00—13.00
Parallel sessions repeated on Friday (max of 10 in each group) (IN-PERSON ONLY)
i) Pole Press Demonstration (Geoff Wyeth)
ii) Michael Twyman’s Lithographic Collection (Emma Minns)

13.00—14.15
Lunch (provided)

14.15—15.30
Session 2: Transregional Encounters with the Lithographic Press (HYBRID)
Erin Piñon Ottoman-Armenian encounters with the lithographic press
Mimi Cheng Medium and message in nineteenth-century maps of East Asia

16.00
Book Launch (HYBRID)
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Global Typography. Editors in conversation, followed by discussion
(Online attendees: please go to this separate registration page for the book launch)
Curators’ tour of exhibition in Department of Typography & Graphic Communication Display Area: Books and the People. Opening up access to books and reading #Go All In

Friday, 6 March

9.30—10.15
Coffee (provided)

10.15—12.30
Session 3: Modernity and Visual Experimentation (HYBRID)
Hannah Rose Blakeley Belgian lithography and book illustration ca.1900
Helena de Barros Material logics of printed colour in European and Brazilian chromolithography
Asiel Sepúlveda Lithography and the spectacle of sugar manufacturing in nineteenth-century Cuba

12.30—13.30
Lunch (provided)

13.30—14.30
Parallel sessions (max of 10 in each group) (IN-PERSON ONLY)
i) Pole Press Demonstration (Geoff Wyeth)
ii) Michael Twyman’s Lithographic Collection (Emma Minns)

14.30—15.30
Collection Session: Iranian Lithography (Borna Izadpanah) (IN-PERSON ONLY)

15.30—15.45
Closing remarks & Tea in commemoration of Professor Michael Twyman (IN-PERSON ONLY)

19.15
Conference Dinner (participants & invited guests)

Speakers and their talks
Borna Izadpanah, University of Reading
Script, stone, and type: visual continuities in Iran’s earliest printed Qurʼans
This paper examines the visual grammar of Iran’s earliest printed Qurʼans to demonstrate how early nineteenth-century Qajar printers negotiated the intersection of established manuscript practices and newly introduced print technologies. Focusing on the first movable-type Qurʼans produced from 1827 and the earliest lithographed editions issued from 1834, it argues that, unlike European precedents, Qurʼanic printing in Iran was conceived as a project of visual continuity rather than a break with prevailing scribal conventions. Printing techniques entering the country through its northern frontiers were selectively and carefully integrated by local craftspeople, resulting in editions that were framed, produced, and received as culturally grounded artefacts. Through a comparative analysis of textual rendering, page composition, ornamental devices, and colophonic formulae, this study shows that both typographic and lithographic Qurʼans pursued a shared strategy: sustaining manuscript-derived forms of authority while capitalising on the technical possibilities of mechanical reproduction.

Dr Borna Izadpanah is a Lecturer in Typography & Graphic Communication. His areas of interest include typeface design, typography, lithography, and the history of printed letterforms, particularly in the context of languages that have been represented with the Arabic script. He seeks to develop diverse and inclusive theoretical and practical outputs by linking an updated understanding of the past with current practices. Central to his work is decolonising the curriculum and promoting diversity by combining expertise in a wide range of related disciplines that reach beyond European visual cultures and the Latin script.

Erin Piñon, Kunsthistorisches Institut
‘In the lithographic studio of Hovhannes Muyhendisyan’: Ottoman-Armenian encounters with the lithographic press
No one batted an eye when, in the middle of the nineteenth-century, Ottoman- Armenian printer-publisher typographer Hovhannes Muyhendisyan issued three consecutive titles, furnished with images prepared by three different artists, using three different methods of printing. This was par for the course in Istanbul’s highly competitive, collaborative, and commercialized Armenian language print market. These images, however, reflect the earliest encounters Armenian printers had with the lithographic press, the most cutting-edge method of reproducing images globally. They also mark a point of departure from how Ottoman-Armenian printed books looked in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—filled with muddy impressions of worn and battered Dutch woodblocks that constituted the capital’s “stock” of available images. This paper discusses the role Muyhendisyan’s print enterprise played in shaping Armenian book arts in the nineteenth century and the permanent, global repercussions his titles set in motion. It is the first to identify and treat Armenian contributions to lithography (վիմագրութիւն)—a troubling misnomer of “stone writing”—often confused in Armenian-language scholarship with the much more popular field of epigraphy. At stake here is a reconsideration of existing views on the development of the Armenian printed book and its images. An examination of the images, origins, and functions in new settings, allow us to move beyond the simple question of European material, iconographic and stylistic influence and instead ask, how does Armenian art interact with and build on itself?

Dr Erin Piñon is an art historian specializing in early modern Armenian book arts, spanning cultural networks from Europe to Asia. Her dissertation, The Illuminated Haysmawurk‘: Ottoman-Armenian Painting and Confessionalism in the Age of Print (Princeton, 2024), explored seventeenth-century Ottoman- Armenian manuscript art, book culture, translation, and ritual practices across Istanbul, Aleppo, and Isfahan. Piñon’s research on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century visual and material culture has appeared in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s publications, the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, West 86th Street, and the Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies, to cite a few. Her ongoing work examines the aesthetics of the Armenian diasporic condition and print culture between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.

Hannah Rose Blakeley, Princeton University
Belgian lithography and book illustration ca. 1900
This paper will explore the development of lithography in Belgium in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, considering the ways in which book illustration and intermediality were central to the Belgian avant-garde. Focusing on a key example, Léon Spilliaert’s series of ten lithographs, Serres chaudes (Hothouses), printed in 1918 to illustrate poems by Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck, this talk will show how artists, writers, publishers, and printers formed a core network in and around Brussels, and how their collaborations helped to shape the trajectories of Belgian modernism.

Dr Hannah Rose Blakeley received her PhD in art history from Princeton University, where she is now a faculty member in the Princeton Writing Program. Her current book project explores how Belgian artists James Ensor and Léon Spilliaert transformed carnival from a social practice into a radical artistic strategy, offering a new and emphatically visual conception of the carnivalesque. She has published “Le 17e siècle de Rops : vers la modernité” with the Musée Félicien Rops in Belgium, has an upcoming article on James Ensor in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, and recently recorded a short video interview with leonspilliaert.be. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Scholars program and the Belgian American Education Foundation.

Helena de Barros, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro
Material logics of printed colour in European and Brazilian chromolithography
This talk examines chromolithographic production and practices in Europe and Brazil from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, drawing on research carried out at the University of Reading’s Department of Typography and on Brazilian archival collections. Grounded in Michael Twyman’s documentary approach, the study investigates technical, material, and chromatic evidence in ephemeral prints, children’s books, and progressive proofs. Special attention is given to the material logic of printed colour, understood as the interplay between tonal construction, sequential presswork, chromatic decision-making, and the economic and cultural factors that shaped lithographic workflows. Through magnified analysis of colour-layer structures, a purpose-built chromatic scale with descriptive universal naming, and visualisations of complex datasets, the study outlines a methodological framework that highlights the layered complexity of chromatic techniques and offers a material-based perspective on printed colour across different cultural contexts.

Dr Helena de Barros is an associate professor in the Design programme at ESDI/UERJ, where she teaches graphic design, digital imaging, and visual technologies. She received the CAPES Award in 2019 (doctoral thesis) and in 2025 (supervision) and was a Research Fellow at Brazil’s National Library (2018–2019). She is a member of the CNPq research group Memoráveis and coordinates the Special Interest Group on Graphic Memory of the Brazilian Society for Information Design. In 2025 she was a visiting researcher at the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing, University of Reading, where she studied chromolithographic techniques in the Michael Twyman Collection. Her work as a researcher, designer, visual artist, and collector of printed artefacts explores visual language, graphic techniques, graphic memory, books, and ephemeral prints, with emphasis on Brazilian chromolithography.

Wei Jin Darryl Lim
Lithography at Riau’s ‘Gateway to Mecca’: print and scribal labour in Penyengat island, 1856–79
Lithography found its way to a C19 Malay world in 1826, imported First by Dutch and later English missionaries. Yet the ingress for local adaptation and adoption of lithography was arguably through oceanic routes that were linked by port cities along the pilgrimage path of the Hajj to, and from the centres of Islam. Through these streams, religiously-oriented literature and ephemera found their way back to the Malay world. This ushered a broader acceptance of lithography as a viable means of religious textual production, and reproduction.
By 1856, at least one lithographic press was at work on the island of Penyengat in Riau – possibly the earliest royal press extant in the Muslim-Malay world. This press was likely acquired by the court of the Yang dipertuan Muda (Viceroy of Riau who resided at Penyengat island). From the literature, this lithographic press seems to have been procured as a means to supplement scribal labour in the production of texts. Islamic histories, translations, ephemera, and legal documents were products that were lithographed by the court; and the lithographic press’ primary function it seems was to serve the bureaucratic needs, and Islamic literary production of Penyengat’s courtly elite.
This paper will focus on technical aspects of these lithographed texts that emanated from the Penyengat press; and will examine print within this specific nineteenth-century Muslim-Malay milieu, and expand on the court’s links to Singapore-based Muslim commercial lithographers. Despite the lithographic output of Penyengat’s printers, there is a distinct exclusion of the press from epistolary, notary, and bureaucratic documents kept by the Penyengat court; little to no information about its presence, purchase, or use is extant except for the lithographed artefacts themselves. This absence, I will argue, is of significance – and questions and hypotheses surrounding this lacuna within Penyengat records will be discussed.

Dr Wei Jin Darryl Lim is an independent book and printing historian. His research remit focuses on the histories of the lithographic book in Southeast Asia in relation to global histories of printing; the movement of printing materials and technologies, and missionary printing and typefounding projects in the Malay archipelago. His doctoral research on the early history of Muslim-Malay lithography and has been published in the journal Indonesia and the Malay World. Darryl was previously the American Printing History Association’s Mark Samuels Lasner Fellow (2019), and an Early Career Research Fellow at the University of London (2022–23).

Asiel Sepúlveda, Babson College
Picturing “the fog effect:” Lithography and the spectacle of sugar manufacturing in nineteenth-century Cuba
This paper will examine the cloudy visuality of Cuban sugar plantations. It focuses on the representation of fog, smoke and steam that emerges from industrial machinery, boiling houses and burning landscapes. During the early nineteenth-century, Cuban planters became avid technocrats. They invested in industrial machinery, railroads, steamships and many other technologies including lithography. This modernizing campaign attracted European artists who began to produce images for local elites. The paper argues that “capturing the fog effect,” a phrase that one lithographer used in his image, became an imperative to represent the modernization of the Cuban landscape. The fog, I add, also served to obscure the relationships between industry, environmental destruction and the exploitation of slave labor.

Dr Asiel Sepúlveda is Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at Babson College. His research focuses on the development of lithographic arts in late colonial Cuba. Sepúlveda’s forthcoming book Picturing the Planters’ Metropolis: Art, Slavery and Global Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Havana, explores how lithographic artists imagined a modern Havana built under the cultural regimes of Spanish colonialism and plantation slavery.

Mimi Cheng, Kunsthistorisches Institut
Medium and message in nineteenth-century maps of East Asia
This paper examines an unstudied series of maps published in China and Japan between 1875 and 1898. Each is titled “Map of East Asian Territories” [亞細亞東 部輿地圖] and shows the eastern Qing empire, southern Manchuria, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. In addition to having the same title, they are also remarkably similar in both content and composition. By tracing the genealogy of each unique copy and attending to their aesthetic forms and epistemological claims, this paper seeks to chart a way to think about modern maps not just as expressions of sovereignty or territoriality, but also as material artifacts that contain the traces of their making. While they are just some of the countless examples of how foreign printing technologies were introduced and assimilated into local print cultures and economies, this series of maps also serves as a reminder that exchanges occur not just between metageographic categories of east and west, or binaries of foreign and indigenous, but at other geographic scales and relational categories.

Mimi Cheng is a cultural historian of the global nineteenth century whose research focuses on transnational visual culture between Europe and East Asia, comparative histories of cartography and the built environment, and the relationship between knowledge and imperialism. She is a postdoctoral researcher with the Lise Meitner Group Coded Objects, where she is completing her first book manuscript. Previously, she was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Newberry Library. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Historical Geography and has been supported by the ACLS, SSRC, German Historical Institute Washington, and the Forschungzentrum Gotha at the Universität Erfurt. She earned her PhD from the University of Rochester in 2022.

Book launch: The Bloomsbury Handbook of Global Typography, 5 March
2026-03-05 16:00 - 17:00 | Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading (Whiteknights Campus), 2 Earley Gate, RG6 6BZ, United Kingdom
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Global Typography takes the broadest possible view of typography, defining it as ‘design for reading’. It considers all kinds of reading matter and visual communication systems; digital, environmental, printed, and produced by hand.
By offering a rich collection of texts that are genuinely international in authorship and in scope, it seeks to rebalance the Western bias of so many books on the subject. It gives space to new voices and emerging standpoints about the global nature of design, the needs of particular communities of readers, and about the need for inclusivity and historical understanding in design practice and research.
Thirty-seven chapters by forty-three contributors show the interdisciplinary range of research in typography today, exemplifying the relationship between history, theory, and practice that is at the heart of the discipline. They feature over 500 illustrations, mostly in colour, and full bibliographic references.
Join the editors in conversation and discussion
The event will be hybrid:
– in person in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading (Whiteknights Campus), RG6 6BZ
– or on-line (via MS Teams): please register here

Exhibition: Books and the People. Opening up access to books and reading #Go All In
2026-03-30 - 2026-05-29 | Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading (Whiteknights Campus), 2 Earley Gate, RG6 6BZ, United Kingdom
“I say that this revolution has been for some time overdue, because from one aspect it is, of course, only part of the great change in selling policy which some have called the ‘democratisation of production’. […] Books are only just beginning to feel the influence which, in the course of a generation, has brought gramophone records, silk stockings, foreign travel, and smoked salmon (to take four examples at random) within the reach of small purses.”
(Margaret Cole, Books and the People, 1938)
One hundred years ago, a group of publishers, writers, businesses, and libraries were challenging who had access to books while defending the importance of reading for pleasure. In her Books and the People (1938), socialist Margaret Cole described the new book clubs and commercial high street libraries of the 1920s and ’30s as the “opening stages of a real revolution […] in the world of English-language book production”.
This exhibition looks at a moment before book-buying was possible for most people. We look at some of the changes interwar that made access to new books easier, more convenient, and sometimes cheaper, helping to develop more democratic, shared cultures of reading. We also include examples of everyday printed ephemera that book clubs and societies produced and that tell us about how access to books was encouraged and promoted.
It is curated by Nicola Wilson, Sue Walker and Emma Minns and will be held in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading (Whiteknights Campus), RG6 6BZ. It is open from 30 March to 29 May 2026, Monday to Wednesday only, from 10 am to 4 pm.
Group visits can be made by appointment. Please email lpgdc@reading.ac.uk.
The exhibition is part of the National Year of Reading National Year of Reading 2026 | Go All In initiative. 2026 is the National Year of Reading, a Department for Education scheme supported by the National Literacy Trust, which aims to tackle a decline in reading enjoyment and reconnect people of all ages with reading as a relevant and rewarding activity.
There will be a CBCP exhibition event on Thursday 30th April 5-7pm. More information to follow soon.
Pieces on display at the exhibition

CBCP x OIW webinar: Arabic Young Adult Literature in Translation, 23 April
2026-04-23 17:00 - 18:30
The webinar series ‘Explorations in Translation for Children’ is co-organised by The Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing in partnership with Outside in World, the organisation dedicated to exploring and promoting children’s books in translation.
23rd April 2026, 5pm-6.30pm UK time. Online only. To join via MS Teams, please register here.
Arabic Young Adult Literature in Translation: in conversation with translators, advocates and scholars of Arabic-language writing for young audiences, Sawad Hussain, Susanne Abou Ghaida and Marcia Lynx Qualey. Despite a huge, diverse base of speakers and vibrant publishing industries, relatively little Arabic-language literature is available in translation to readers of English. This is particularly true of books for children and young adults.
Drawing on many collective years of experience in the field, our speakers will talk about what kind of Arabic-language YA is getting translated into English, who is translating and publishing these works, and what might be behind some of these trends. They will offer us a window into the scouting and pitching processes, discussing the specific challenges and opportunities that they face in translating children’s books from Arabic to English. We will learn about advocacy initiatives such as ArabKidLitNow! and the Bila Hudood digital literary festival, hear about what titles they have translated recently, and what they are hoping to translate next.
Speakers:
Sawad Hussain is a PEN Award-winning translator from Arabic. She has been shortlisted for The Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize and the National Book Award for Translation, and longlisted for the Moore Prize in Human Rights Writing, among others. A former co-chair of the Translators’ Association in the UK, Sawad has also served as a judge for the Palestine Book Awards and the 2023 National Translation Award. She has run translation workshops under the auspices of Shadow Heroes, Africa Writes, Shubbak Festival, the Yiddish Book Center, the British Library and the National Centre for Writing. In 2024, she became the first translator-in-residence for Wasafiri, and was the Spring 2025 translator-in-residence at PIIRS, Princeton University.
Marcia Lynx Qualey is a writer, publisher, editor, translator, and speaker. She is the founder of ArabLit & ArabLit Quarterly, for which she won an Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature in 2024. Her personal focus is on translated literature for young readers, including YA, middle grade, and chapter books. Her most recent is a co-translation — with Sawad Hussain — of Maria Daadouch’s I Want Golden Eyes.
Susanne Abou Ghaida is a researcher specialised in Arabic children’s and adolescent literature. She has a PhD from the University of Glasgow, and her doctoral research was on the contemporary Arabic adolescent novel. From 2023 to 2025, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Aix-Marseille University, where she was carrying out research on The 13 Devils, an Arab espionage/adventure series for adolescents. She has written on a number of subjects, including multicultural picture books; disability; Arabic adolescent literature and reading response. She is currently the Vice President of the Young Adult Studies Association and Senior Editor of the International Journal of Young Adult Literature.

Break Through Blocks and Get Published, 13 May
2026-05-13 15:00 - 17:00
This is a rare opportunity to spend time with a novelist and an editor, hearing from them about what it takes to break through creative blocks – and get your work published.
This event will be held online via MS Teams on 13 May 2026 from 3pm-5pm & is free to attend, but you need to register here.
Dylan Morrison has known he wanted to be a writer since roughly age five. His fanfiction, which he’s been posting online for nearly two decades, has been translated into more than fifteen languages and read by millions across the globe. A queer trans man himself, Dylan has a particular passion for telling stories about complex, layered queer characters, and for depicting those characters finding joy, self-acceptance, and love.
Dylan is based in Cleveland in a home with too many books for anyone to read in a lifetime, and a frankly excessive amount of jam. His novels Fall Into You and Recipe for Trouble are available now, and his third book – Second Helpings – will be published on 21st May 2026.
Hannah Bond is a freelance editor of commercial fiction. Previously, she has worked in-house for major traditional and digital publishers including Orion, Hodder & Stoughton, Bookouture, and Amazon. In a former life, she trained as a chef.
We’ll hear from Dylan and Hannah about what you can do right now to make your best work and find routes into publication. There will be illuminating conversation, and plenty of time to ask questions.

CBCP seminar: ‘It is a worthy project, but […] the public is satiated’: Publishing Holocaust Testimonies from East-Central Europe, 14 May
2026-05-14 17:00 - 18:00 | Room 127, Edith Morley Building, University of Reading, RG6 6EL, United Kingdom
Speaker: Dr Joanna Rzepa – Senior Lecturer, Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies, University of Essex

This research seminar is a hybrid event & is free & open to all

To join us in person come along to Room 127, Edith Morley Building, University of Reading (Whiteknights campus), RG6 6EL
To join via MS Teams, please register here

In this talk, Dr Joanna Rzepa will examine the translation and publishing history of Holocaust testimonies from East-Central Europe. Exploring the production and circulation of selected survivor narratives since World War II until the fall of the Iron Curtain, she will interrogate British and American publishers’ agendas and editorial practices, which she situates within the broader context of the cultural politics of the Cold War.
The talk will consider censorship regimes that shaped the construction and circulation of testimonial narratives during the Cold War, paying particular attention to the changing political and historical status of the Holocaust in East-Central Europe and globally. It will also bring to light cases of complex publishing trajectories of narratives such as Mary Berg’s Warsaw Ghetto Diary (1945), which – while originally written in Polish – only exist in various translations, retranslations, and backtranslations as the original source texts have never been published and, in some cases, are no longer extant.
About our speaker:
Dr Joanna Rzepa is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex and a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow. Her research interests include translation history, Holocaust writing, and publishing studies.

4th CBCP Postgraduate Symposium, 19 May 2026
2026-05-19 09:00 - 17:15 | Global Study Lounge, 2nd floor, Edith Morley Building, University of Reading (Whiteknights campus), RG6 6EL, RG6 6EL
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

9.20 – 9.25 Welcome and Introduction

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)

11.00 – 11.15 Coffee break

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)

12.45 – 1.30 Lunch

1.30 – 2.30 Workshop with MERL

2.30 – 2.45 Coffee break

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)

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)

5.00 – 5.15 Closing remarks

CBCP Symposium: People in Publishing: Diversity, Leadership and Publishing’s Futures, 29 June 2026
2026-06-29 10:00 - 17:00 | Henley Business School, University of Reading (Whiteknights campus), RG6 6UD
Date: Monday 29th June 2026
Time: 10.00am – 5.00pm
Venue: Henley Business School, University of Reading (Whiteknights Campus)
To book tickets to attend the symposium in person or online, click here.
(Please note: For standard delegates, we will charge £10 to cover a sandwich lunch, and morning & afternoon refreshments. Students & independent researchers can attend free of charge. Online attendance is also free of charge)
Schedule
10:00 – 10:05: Welcome

10:05 – 10:35: Opening Address: “Building Diversity in the Media Industries”
Joanna Abeyie MBE – Former Director of Creative Diversity BBC, Founder BlueMoon Consultancy

10:35 – 11:30: Panel: “Bridging the Gap: Academia and Industry in Dialogue on EDI in the Publishing Industry”

Moderator:  TBC
Panel:

Melissa Carr – Lecturer in International Human Resources Management & EDI Director at World of Work Institute
Vaseem Khan – Crime Fiction author
Emma Shercliff – Laxfield Literary agency
Aarti Kumari – The Emma Press

11:30 –11:45: Comfort break

11:45 – 1:00: Research Papers: “Geo-politics and Global Structures”
Chair:  TBC
Panel:

George Cooper & Christopher Adams (UCL) – “Exporting Exclusion: The Impact of the US Political Climate on the UK Publishing Industry”
Hyei Jin Kim (University of Reading) – “Who Governs the Flow of Books?: The Legacy of the Traditional Market Agreement“
Karishma Koshal (University of Exeter) – “The Foundations of the Anglophone Trade Publishing Industry in India”
Frances Weightman (Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing) – “Becoming a Reluctant Gatekeeper: A Case Study of the Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing”

1:00 – 1:45: Networking lunch

1:45 – 3:15: Lightning Talks & Research Papers Parallel Session

Stream 1: “Commercial Approaches to Diversifying Publishing”
Stream 2: “Networks & Institutional Power”

Bronwen Price (CEO Seren Books) – “Inclusive Commissioning: Dethroning the Gatekeepers”
Liciane Correa (Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janiero) – “The Past and Present of Freelancer Work in Book Proofreading in Brazil”

Nicola Daly (University of Waikato) – “Indigenous publishing in Aotearoa New Zealand: A Case Study”
Amanda Allen (Eastern Michigan University) – “Visible Invisibility: Women’s Professional Autonomy and U.S. Children’s Publishing, 1919–1973″

Swara Shukla (Independent Researcher) – “Inclusion and Diversity in Collaborative Publishing Models: A Case Study of the Zubaan-Penguin Joint List in India“
Chrissy Taylor (University of Waikato) – “Gender and Sexual Identity in Aotearoa New Zealand: Library Acquisition Policies in Relation to LGBTQIA+ Communities in New Zealand”

Agata Mrva-Montoya (University of Sydney) – “Accessibility Champions as Diversity Leaders: Driving Publishing’s Inclusive Future”
Maria Belen Riveiro (University of Buenos Aires/University of Newcastle) – “Rethinking Bibliodiversity: the Universal Put into Question”

Megan Farr (Bath Spa University) – “Culturally Responsive Publishing Models”
Kanupriya Dhingra (BML Mujal University) – “Beyond the Publisher: How Bookstores, Bazaars, and Libraries Shape Independent Publishing in Delhi “

3:15 – 3:30: Coffee/tea break

3:30 – 4:30: Roundtable: “Digital Platforms and AI in the Future of Publishing”

Moderator:  TBC
Discussants:

Basak Bak – Lecturer in Law, Copyright and AI
Simon Rowberry – Associate Professor of Publishing, UCL, Academic Director of Education for the Department of Information Studies
Julie Cohen – Author, PhD Candidate, University of Reading

4:30 – 5:00: Keynote: “Inclusive Talent Pipelines”
Professor Katy Shaw – Director of the UKRI/AHRC Creative Communities Programme; Professor of Publishing & Writing Northumbria University

5:00: Wrap up followed by an informal CBCP social/drinks (5 – 6pm)
