Concentration Camps and Kindertransport: Two stories of Jewish Refugees in Britain - film screening and Q&A
2023-09-11 17:30 - 19:00 (Europe/London) | Reading Biscuit Factory, Unit 1A, Queen's Walk (Corner Of Oxford Road), Reading, RG1 7QE, United Kingdom
Join us for this screening of the short film, Heilig, which interviews the Austrian Jewish Kindertransportee Gerhard Heilig and tells the story of his father, Bruno, who survived two concentration camps before finding refuge in England.
An introduction by Dr Ellen Pilsworth (Lecturer in German, University of Reading) and Q&A with film-maker Steven Hatton will explore how Bruno and Gerhard’s stories represent different aspects of Britain’s response to the Nazis’ persecution of Austrian Jews.

The event will be held at Reading Biscuit Factory and is open to Publishing Anti-fascism conference delegates, members of the University and the general public. Tickets are free but must be booked in advance via Eventbrite.

The Children's Books History Society Study Day on Families in Children's Literature (Part 2)
2023-10-28 09:30 - 16:30 | Church Hall of the Crown Court Church of Scotland, Russell Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2B 5EZ
The Children’s Books History Society Study Day
Saturday, 28th October 2023
9.30am-4.30pm
Venue:
Church Hall of the Crown Court Church of Scotland
Russell Street
Covent Garden
London
WC2B 5EZ
The theme for the Study Day is Families in Children’s Literature (Part 2).
The Study Day includes the following four talks & costs £25 per person (includes lunch):

Brian Sibley: Tove Jansson’s Family Moomintroll: The family we’d all like to have
Hilary Clare: Charlotte Yonge, the first writer for teenage girls
(**Celebrating the bicentenary of the birth of Charlotte Yonge**)

Howard Bailes: The Carey Family: an exploration of the novels of Ronald Welch
Sarah Jardine-Willoughby: The Gatty Family: Close and Talented

To find out more & to book a place, please complete the booking form available here.
Speaker biographies
Brian Sibley is an author, broadcaster and screenwriter, and has written and presented numerous dramas, documentaries and features on BBC radio since 1976. He has also written numerous books, including several books on The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and on children’s writers such as C.S. Lewis. He has also contributed columns and reviews to several newspapers and magazines. He is the President of the Lewis Carroll Society, and an honorary member of the CBHS, The Magic Circle and the Tolkien Society.
Hilary Clare read Modern History at St Hugh’s College, Oxford and subsequently trained as an archivist at the University of North Wales, Bangor. After a few years working in that field she became a teacher, and later a professional genealogist. An interest is children’s books in general led to specializing in girls’ school stories, and also in the Victorian writer Charlotte Mary Yonge.
Howard Bailes encountered Ronald Welch’s wonderful books as a child and they contributed to his early fascination with history. Although he has plenty of historical and literary interests, he admits to a certain leaning towards military history, rather like Ronald himself. For some twenty years he led St Paul’s Girls’ School’s annual tour of the Great War battlefields. Howard’s PhD thesis concerned the Victorian army, on which he has published, along with articles on various topics, a book on the arts-and-crafts architect Gerald Horsley and a history of St Paul’s Girls’ School.
Sarah Jardine-Willoughby is a retired librarian who worked mainly in the University sector, first at the LSE and then for nearly twenty years at Middlesex University, and also spent few years as librarian for the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dance. She is an avid book collector of mainly children’s books including Mrs Molesworth, Charlotte Yonge, Maria Edgeworth and of course Mrs Ewing & Mrs Gatty. She is the Treasurer of the CBHS and more recently of the Charlotte M Yonge Fellowship

Typodiversity 01: exploring the Arabic script world
2023-11-03 - 2023-11-04 | Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading, RG6 6BZ
UPDATE: The full programme for the two day event on 3 & 4 November is available here.
CBCP is collaborating with Typodiversity, an open, participatory event series combining talks and workshops on the intersection of research and practice in typography and type design. Our agenda raises issues of agency, resource, representation, and inclusion in the development of environments for authoring, design, and distribution. We aim to place informed, representative narratives at the heart of discourse.
We intend that each event adapts to the environment in which it is held, shaped by the team and hosting location. There are two conditions for Typodiversity events: 1) that they are run with as little expenditure as possible, taking advantage of institutional resources; and 2) that the recorded content of the talks and workshops will be openly and freely accessible.
We prioritise a hybrid online format to minimise the impact of travel and attendance costs, visa hurdles, legal limitations, and time zone differences. While we recognise that English functions as a shared language for global scholarship and exchange, we aim to actively support other languages as an alternative. To achieve this, we ask presenters to provide a video of their presentation in advance, so that subtitles can be added: English presentations will have subtitles in the relevant second language of the event, and vice versa. We are starting this initiative with only one pair of languages to gain experience of time and effort required, and aim to extend to more languages as we grow. To facilitate real-time Q&A sessions and open conversation rooms, we aim to provide interpreters for real-time translation.
The first event will take place at the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading (UK), on the 3rd & 4th November 2023, on the theme of “exploring the Arabic script world.” Talks, speakers and workshops will be announced shortly. Please follow us on Twitter and Instagram for updates and to stay connected.
https://twitter.com/typodiversity
https://www.instagram.com/typodiversity/

Stickers as self-authorised ‘publishing’ in urban spaces: The graphic language, themes, and localisations of stickers in the Ruhr area, Germany
2023-11-30 17:00 - 18:00 | Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading, RG6 6BZ
Speaker: Irmi Wachendorff (University of Reading)

This research seminar is free & open to all.
Join us in person in the University of Reading’s Department of Typography, Room T4.
To join via MS Teams, please register here.

Irmi Wachendorff’s presentation will analyse a dataset of 5500 tagged and geo-referenced stickers in public space from the Signs of the Metropolis research project (Ziegler et al. 2022) which explored visual multilingualism in the Ruhr area in Germany. She will focus on typographic and semiotic visual analysis, discuss stickers in comparison to other signs in urban space, and examine the publicised themes.
Stickers are one of the smallest and yet – on looking closer – one of the most visually expressive and liberated forms of signs in urban space (Wachendorff 2021). Clustered on dedicated canvases such as lampposts, road signs and electricity boxes, they are placed by various stakeholders with different goals: supporters of political parties, protest movements, members of football clubs, music fans, sticker artists, and commercial actors. Stickering is an act of democratisation and place-making in which citizens as authors negotiate their social and cultural positions through visual signs in the urban environment (Vasileva 2021).
♣
Irmi Wachendorff is an Associate Professor in the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading. She is a graphic designer and design historian with specialisations in typography and sociolinguistics. Her PhD focussed on ‘Typographic Landscapes – Letters in Cities as Social Artefacts’ at the University of Duisburg-Essen and was funded by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. Irmi is passionate about design education, the practice, theory and history of graphic communication, typography and visual culture, lettering in urban space, the relationship of typography and language, and the bridge between graphic design and sociolinguistic disciplines.

Heinemann and Biafractivist Authors: Politics of Publishing the Rebel
2023-12-07 17:00 - 18:00 | Room 257, Edith Morley Building, University of Reading, RG6 6EL
Speaker: Dr Abba Abba (University of Reading)

This research seminar is free & open to all.
Join us in person in the Edith Morley Building, Room 257.
To join via MS Teams, register here.
Dr Abba Abba’s paper interrogates the archival and literary evidence of Heinemann’s minoritization of Biafran voices and politicisation of publishing them during the Nigeria-Biafra war. It argues that some significant publisher-author correspondences and unpublished materials reflecting the perspectives of Biafractivist authors, which are kept at the African Writers Series’ Archive at the University of Reading, can function as research tools for engaging and reclaiming the perceived “rebel” authors’ voices and the publisher’s ambivalent circumstances during the war. Relying on a postcolonial reading of Homi Bhabha’s “Third space” as a theoretical strategy, and deploying archival methodology and its application to literary intersectionality, it teases out how these materials represent Biafrans as “outsiders within” Nigeria., and why Biafran voices fall through the cracks in the war’s historicity through an analysis of their experiences in selected documents and unpublished materials on the war
♣
Dr Abba Abba is currently a British Academy Visiting Research Fellow, Department of English Literature, University of Reading, with some research visits at the Special Collections Archive at MERL. He is a Fellow of the German Academic Exchange Service – DAAD (completed a postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Humboldt University, Berlin, 2018–2019). He is also a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (completed his another Postdoctoral Fellowship in the African Humanities Programme with Residency at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania 2021–2022). Abba won the Nigeria-LNG Prize for Literary Criticism 2019 as well as the Association of Nigerian Authors Prizes for Literary Criticism for both 2019 and 2022. Author of the novel The Ugly Queen, and the plays Lunatic on the Throne and The Blood Price, Abba’s research interests cut across the conversations of literature with cultural, ecocritical and archival ecologies. A Lecturer in the Department of English and Literary Studies, Federal University Lokoja, Nigeria, Abba has previously served as the Head, Department of English and Literary Studies, Edwin Clark University, Kiagbodo Nigeria. He received his MA and PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

Translating and Publishing Turkish Literature in the Anglosphere
2024-01-18 - 2024-01-19
This two-day hybrid symposium was organized by Özlem Berk Albachten and Daniela la Penna and is supported by the British Academy.
It will take place from 18-19 January 2024 at the University of Reading and online. Day 1 (18 January) will be hybrid and Day 2 (19 January) will be online-only. The full programme for the symposium is below.

For online attendance (5-7pm) on the 18 January, please register here*
For in-person attendance (5-7pm) on the 18 January in Room 125, Edith Morley Building, University of Reading Whiteknights Campus, please register by emailing your full name and any access requirements to cbcp@reading.ac.uk
For online attendance (1-6pm) on the 19 January, please register here*

(*If the registration form does not open up in your internet browser, clearing your cache may get around this problem. Instructions on how to do this are here. Alternatively, you can try another browser such as Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge. If the problem persists, please email cbcp@reading.ac.uk)
The symposium will bring together academics, translators, editors, and literary agents to discuss issues concerning translating and publishing Turkish literary works in the English-speaking world from a variety of perspectives.
Keynote speakers include Professor Maureen Freely speaking about her over 20 years of experience as a translator between English and Turkish and Professor Aron Aji on translating Turkish “National Classics” for a present-minded market and readership.
Contributors will discuss the presence of Turkish literature in the English language (Arzu Akbatur) and the reception of Turkish fiction in the Anglophone world (Duygu Tekgül). Speakers will also offer perspectives of literary agents (Amy Spangler) and independent publishers (Nefise Kahraman) in bringing Turkish literary works into English.
Other talks will discuss the presence of Turkish literature (Arzu Akbatur) and the reception of Turkish fiction in the Anglophone world (Duygu Tekgül)
Programme
Thursday, 18 January
Location: Online & Room 125 Edith Morley Building, University of Reading Whiteknights campus
17.00 -17.15 Welcome
17:15 -18:15 Keynote 1: Professor Maureen Freely (University of Warwick): Translating the landscape: An overview of 20 years spent traveling between Turkish and English
(Chair: Özlem Berk Albachten)
Friday 19 January
Location: Online only
14:00 – 14:15 Welcome
14:15 – 14:45 Özlem Berk Albachten (Boğaziçi University): Turkish Literature in English: A Bibliographical Survey.
14:45 -15:15 Dr. Duygu Tekgül (Bahçeşehir University): The Reception of Contemporary Turkish Fiction in the Anglophone World: Patterns and Themes
(Chair: Özlem Berk Albachten)
15:15 -15:30 Break
15:30 -16:00 Amy Spangler (AnatoliaLit Agency): On the Agency of Agents and Translators: Navigating the Currents of Publishing
16:00 – 16:30 Dr. Nefise Kahraman (University of Toronto): From Translation to Readership: Practices and Predicaments of an Independent Publisher in the Canadian Publishing Scene
(Chair: Nicola Wilson)
16:30 -16:45 Break
16:45 -17:45 Keynote 3: Professor Aron Aji (The University of Iowa): Too Late, Too Soon: Translating National Classics for the Present-Time
(Chair: Daniela La Penna)
Speakers
Maureen Freely is a writer, a translator, a professor at the University of Warwick, and the former President of English PEN. She has written eight novels, including four novels set in Istanbul – The Life of the Party, Enlightenment, Sailing through Byzantium, and (most recently) My Blue Peninsula – as well as a translator’s memoir, Angry in Piraeus. Her translations from Turkish include Tezer Özlü’s Cold Nights of Childhood, Sevgi Soysal’s Dawn, Suat Derviş’s In the Shadow of the Yali, Sema Kaygusuz’s The Well of Trapped Words, Tuba Çandar’s Hrant Dink: An Armenian Voice of the Voiceless in Turkey, Fethiye Çetin’s My Grandmother and The Grandchildren, Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book, Snow, Istanbul: Memories and a City, Other Colors: Essays and a Story, Istanbul: Memories and the City, and The Museum of Innocence, and – with Alexander Dawe– Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s The Time Regulation Institute, Sait Faik Abasıyanık’s A Useless Man, and Sabahattin Ali’s Madonna in a Fur Coat, as well as Hasan Ali Toptaş’s Shadowless and Reckless, with John Angliss. For many years Freely worked as a journalist in London, writing about literature, feminism, social justice, and human rights.
Aron Aji directs the Translation Programs at the University of Iowa. Past president of The American Literary Translators Association, Aji has given workshops and talks nationally and internationally, including France, Turkey, Armenia, Ukraine, and Northern Macedonia, on such topics as translation pedagogy, translation, and global humanities. A native of Turkey, he has translated works by Turkish writers, including three book-length works by Karasu: Death in Troy, The Garden of Departed Cats (2004 National Translation Award), and A Long Day’s Evening (NEA Literature Fellowship, and short-listed for the 2013 PEN Translation Prize). His recent translations include Ferid Edgü’s Wounded Age and Eastern Tales, and Mungan’s Valor (co-translated with David Gramling) (2022 Global Humanities Translation Prize).
Özlem Berk Albachten is currently a British Academy Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of Languages and Cultures, University of Reading. She is a Professor of Translation Studies at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. Her research interests include translation history, intralingual translation, retranslation, Turkish women translators, and autobiography/life writing. She is the author of Translation and Westernisation in Turkey (2004) and Kuramlar Işığında Açıklamalı Çeviribilim Terimcesi (Annotated Translation Terminology, 2005). She co-edited Perspectives on Retranslation. Ideology, Paratexts, Methods (Routledge, 2019), Retranslation in Turkey (Springer, 2019), Routledge Handbook of Intralingual Translation (2024), and the Special issue: Retranslation, Multidisciplinarity and Multimodality for The Translator (2020).
Duygu Tekgül-Akın has a BA in Translation and Interpreting Studies from Boğaziçi University, an MA in Publishing and Language from Oxford Brookes University, and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Exeter. She did postdoctoral research at the Linguistics and Language Practice Department of the University of the Free State. Her research interests include the sociology of translation, and Turkish literature in English translation. Her work has appeared in international translation journals. She is currently based at Bahçeşehir University.
Amy Marie Spangler is the co-founder of the Turkish literary agency AnatoliaLit and a translator of several books from Turkish to English, including Aslı Erdoğan’s The City in Crimson Cloak, Mehmet Murat Somer’s The Serenity Murders, Sevgi Soysal’s Noontime in Yenişehir -with Kate Ferguson- Selahattin Demirtaş’s Dawn, -with Nermin Menemencioğlu- Leylâ Erbil’s A Strange Woman, and -with Alev Ersan and Mark David Wyers- Erbil’s What Remains.
Nefise Kahraman is a literary scholar and translator with a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto. She holds a BA in Translation Studies from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. She is one of the founding members of Translation Attached, a Toronto-based independent publishing house dedicated to bringing literature from Turkey to an English-reading audience. She is a lecturer in the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto.
For more information, please contact o.berkalbachten@reading.ac.uk.
The image at the top of the page shows a selection of books held in Halide Edib’s library at Istanbul University. Halide Edib’s The Shirt of Flame (1924) and The Clown and His Daughter (1935) were the first Turkish novels appeared in English. Halide Edib (1882-1964) was a Turkish writer, (self-)translator, and a feminist public figure, who became professor of English literature at Istanbul University (1939) and later a member of Parliament (1950-54). Photo credit: Dr. Ekin Öyken.

What’s in a Title: Sir Wydham Deedes, Allen & Unwin, and Reşat Nuri Güntekin’s The Autobiography of a Turkish Girl
2024-02-22 17:00 - 18:00
Speaker: Özlem Berk Albachten (British Academy Visiting Research Fellow, Department of Languages and Cultures, University of Reading)
This research seminar is a hybrid event & is free & open to all

To join us in person come along to Room G08, Chancellor’s Building, University of Reading (Whiteknights campus)
To join via MS Teams, please register here*

(*If the registration form does not open up in your internet browser, clearing your cache may get around this problem. Instructions on how to do this are here. Alternatively, you can try another browser such as Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge. If the problem persists, please email cbcp@reading.ac.uk)

Özlem Berk Albachten’s paper will focus on the first translated Turkish novel in Britain: Reşat Nuri Güntekin’s Çalıkuşu (The Wren, 1923), translated by Sir Wyndham Deedes and published by Allen and Unwin Publishers as The Autobiography of a Turkish Girl in 1949. Based on the correspondence between Sir Deedes and Allen & Unwin between 1945-1949 preserved in the Archive of British Publishers and Printing held at the University of Reading’s Special Collections, the paper will examine the publication process of the novel from pitch to marketing and evaluate the cultural, political, business considerations that shaped the action and decision-making process of “the gate-keepers” that regulated the translation flow from Turkish.
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Özlem Berk Albachten is currently a British Academy Visiting Research Fellow, Department of Languages and Cultures, University of Reading, working on a project that examines the dissemination of Turkish literature in translation in the British book market from 1945 to the mid-Seventies through an evaluation of readers’ reports, sale records, and business correspondence with series editors, translators, and professional readers concerning the assessment of translation projects from Turkish, preserved in the Archive of British Printing and Publishing held at the University of Reading’s Special Collections. She is a Professor of Translation Studies at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. Her research interests include translation history, intralingual translation, retranslation, Turkish women translators, and autobiography/life writing. She is the author of Translation and Westernisation in Turkey (2004) and Kuramlar Işığında Açıklamalı Çeviribilim Terimcesi (Annotated Translation Terminology, 2005). She co-edited Perspectives on Retranslation. Ideology, Paratexts, Methods (Routledge, 2019), Retranslation in Turkey (Springer, 2019), Routledge Handbook of Intralingual Translation (2024), and the Special issue: Retranslation, Multidisciplinarity and Multimodality for The Translator (2020).

Scouting, Translating, and Publishing Young Adult Literature from Latin America
2024-02-28 17:15 - 18:30
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:
Speakers: Claire Storey (Translator/ World Kid Lit) and Rosemarie Hudson (HopeRoad Publishing)

This seminar is a hybrid event (in-person & on Zoom) and is free & open to all.

To register for the Zoom link, please click here.
To join us in person, come to Room 104, Palmer Building, University of Reading (Whiteknights campus), RG6 6EW

In 2021, Claire Storey (Translator/ World Kid Lit) applied for funding from Arts Council England for a project focusing on translating and pitching Young Adult literature from Latin America to UK publishers. In this webinar, she will discuss her project, how she identified Latin America as her focus area, how she pitched the project to UK publishers and what she has learned about scouting and pitching along the way.
Claire will be joined by Rosemarie Hudson (HopeRoad Publishing) who will talk about why she set up HopeRoad Publishing in 2010 and how three of the titles from Claire’s project fitted with her publishing objectives: Never Tell Anyone Your Name by Federico Ivanier (Uruguay), The Darkness of Colours by Martín Blasco (Argentina) and The Wild Ones by Antonio Ramos Revillas (Mexico). Rosemarie and Claire will also discuss how their relationship as publisher and translator has grown and been mutually beneficial.
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Claire Storey – translates from German and Spanish into English, specialising in middle grade and young adult literature. In 2021/22, she was awarded funding from Arts Council England for a translation project focusing on Young Adult Literature from Latin America. From 2019-2023, Claire was co-editor of the blog at World Kid Lit and remains involved in the project highlighting translated books for you people. Claire also acts as an international book scout, seeking out and presenting suitable Spanish and German-language books to English-speaking publishers. Claire regularly volunteers in schools talking about careers with languages and was named Outreach Champion 2021 by the UK Institute of Translation and Interpreting.
Jamaican/British Rosemarie Hudson grew up in London and it’s where she founded her first independent publishing company BlackAmber in 1998. Its ethos was to publish unheard voices in English and international languages, and in particular the best writers and writings from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. Its aim she’s pursued ever since. She published many authors to critical acclaim during this period including Patricia Cumper; Alex Wheatle; Cauvery Madhavan; Rachel Manley; Yvonne Brewster and Gaston-Paul Effa, before her company was bought out. Often called a ‘trailblazer’,
Rosemarie is a keen and experienced mentor, serving on the board of the Book Trade Charity (BTBS) for six years and mentoring on the Arts Council project, Decibel.
About HopeRoad
In 2010 Rosemarie Hudson founded HopeRoad, the indie publisher which loves to share untold stories around identity, cultural stereotyping and injustice, and specialises in encouraging new talent and promoting the best literary voices from and about Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. HopeRoad’s authors include: Tahar Ben Jelloun; Kamala Markandaya: Cauvery Madhavan; Pete Kalu; Ferdinand Dennis; Yan Ge, Max Lobe; Véronique Tadjo, Igiaba Scego, John Agard and Tony Fairweather to name a few. Rosemarie is also a board member of Inpress Books. She is excited about the future for HopeRoad and very much looking forward to celebrating its forthcoming 15th anniversary.

Book launch (online) for The Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing, 1900-2020
2024-03-04 18:00 - 20:00
Join us for lightening talks by contributing authors, discussion and Q&A
Book Launch
Book flyer
To register to attend please sign up here: Meeting Registration – Zoom

CBCP Children’s Literature Workshop: Identities and Visibility in Children’s Print Culture Archives and Collections
2024-03-07 16:00 - 18:00
This workshop hears from three recent CBCP visiting fellows and their research in the children’s culture and the children’s collections held at the University of Reading. Their papers will explore the ways archives and collections (interpreted broadly) can make visible different actors, agents, writers and themes in print culture for children and the construction of identities.
This online workshop is free & open to all.
To join us via MS Teams, please register here.

***
Paper 1:
Aleksandra Wieczorkiewicz, Where the Translators Are (in Victorian Periodicals for Children)
Translators are among the most important agents in children’s literature. But they were often – especially in the early stages of its evolution – marginalized and placed in the background. Not mentioned on the title pages or hidden under pseudonyms or initials they were “invisible storytellers” and “the great disappeared of literary history” (Lathey 2014). In her presentation Where the Translators Are (in the Victorian Periodicals for Children), Aleksandra will talk about the project she carried out in the UoR Special Collections as the CBCP Visiting Research Fellow 2022–23. Its primary objective was to explore the visibility of translators in Victorian children’s periodicals such as Aunt’s Judy Magazine, Good Words for the Young and The Children’s Friend: to find out who the translators working for the periodicals were, whether they left their signature in the texts (in form of prefaces, footnotes, accompanying articles etc.), in which periodicals – if in any – they were most visible, and what this tells us about the position of the translators at the time.
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Paper 2:
Simona Di Martino, “Do you want to be a Nurse?”: Girl and the British Educational Magazines for Girls in 1950s
British girls’ magazines and comics flourished in the UK from the 1950s through the 1970s. The first girls’ magazines, School Friend and Girl, appeared in the early 1950s, even though the girls’ comics trend took off in the latter half of the 1950s, with the long-running titles Bunty and Judy. Magazines for girls have long been regarded as a minor source for the history of education and children’s literature. However, these publications allow us to understand ethical models and values related to a specific historical period. Particularly, my visiting fellowship at the CBCP allowed me to consult the UoR’s Special Collections and analyse many issues of the educational magazine Girl by Hulton Press. This magazine, founded by the Rev. Marcus Morris in 1951, was very much an educational magazine whose heroines, including those who got into scrapes, became involved in tales that had a moral substance and showcased several jobs and careers that young women could pursue. This paper aims to examine the British educational magazine Girl and to assess the ways in which it promoted active and ‘visible’ models of girlhood. Such an analysis will pave the way for a comparative investigation of other European markets for girls, such as the more lacunary Italian one.
***
Paper 3:
Margarida Castellano, Making visible Antifascist and totalitarian discourses in Children’s & YA literature in Spain, 1936 to 2023
This presentation examines the role of children’s and young adult literature in Spain as a medium to confront and undermine fascist and totalitarian ideologies from the Spanish Civil War to 2023. It specifically centers on the 1937 Cartilla Escolar Antifascista and subsequent multimodal texts, illustrating their use of text and imagery as ideological tools against fascism in an era of high illiteracy. It also considers the historical contributions of the Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts and the Misiones Pedagógicas, which highlighted the transformative power of education. Moving to the present, it draws parallels with contemporary picturebooks and graphic novels that defy Spain’s ‘Pact of Oblivion’, showcasing works by renowned authors and illustrators. These modern narratives, like their historical forerunners, intertwine aesthetic appeal with profound socio-historical insights. This research, forming part of the investigation conducted at the CBCP and presented at the 2023 Annual CBCP Conference Publishing Antifascism, emphasizes the critical need for pedagogical strategies based on multiliteracies and critical thinking, thus equipping students to critically engage with dominant narratives and foster a future of social justice.
***
Speakers
Dr Aleksandra Wieczorkiewicz is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Polish and Classical Philology and a researcher in the Children’s Literature & Culture Research Team at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland. Her academic interests include English children’s literature of the Golden Age and children’s literature translation studies. She is the author of an award-winning dissertation on the Polish translation reception of George MacDonald, J.M. Barrie and Cicely Mary Barker; she is also a literary and academic translator. In 2020 Aleksandra completed her PhD fellowship as a Visiting Scholar at the CIRCL, University of Reading; in 2023 she was a Visiting Fellow at the CBCP, UoR, where she carried out the project Translator’s Own Paper? Translated Literature in British Children’s Periodicals of the Victorian Era. She is co-organising the upcoming international conference “Children’s Literature and European Identities” (24-26th October 2024, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland; https://bit.ly/CFP_europeanidentities)
Dr Simona Di Martino is an MHRA postdoctoral fellow at the University of Warwick currently working on her first monograph Italian Gothic Poetry (Liverpool University Press). She holds a PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Warwick. In 2023 Simona was a CBCP Visiting Research Fellow and had the chance to conduct archival research at the MERL Special Collection, at the University of Reading. She organised and took part in national and international conferences and published numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on various topics including the Gothic, children’s literature, and representations of witches in Italian comics. Simona is currently developing a new research project on witch girlhood and female empowerment in Anglo-American and Italian popular print culture for young people. Finally, she is co-organiser of the upcoming conference Seen and Heard: Voices of Transnational Girlhood(s) on Identity, Gender, and Culture Conference to be held at the University of Warwick in April 2024.
Dr Margarida Castellano is a Lecturer in Language and Literature Teaching at the Universitat de València. Author of the award-winning Les altres catalanes. Memòria, identitat i autobiografia en la literatura d’immigració (2018), she has published various chapters and peer-reviewed articles related to the processes of identity formation through literary texts and the uses of multimodal texts in the context of teaching additional languages. Her current research endeavors extend to exploring the integration of multimodal texts and multiliteracy frameworks in additional language instruction, as well as investigating language acquisition within multilingual environments.

SHARP conference 2024
2024-07-01 - 2024-07-05 | University of Reading, Reading, Berkshire, United Kingdom
SHARP 2024
Global Book Cultures: Materialities, Collaborations, Access
University of Reading, Berkshire, UK. 1-5 July 2024
Registration has now closed. For advice on travel and how to get to us: Visit us (reading.ac.uk)
Final programme: SHARP 2024 Programme Final
Abstracts booklet (includes speaker titles and affiliations): SHARP 2024 Annual Conference_Abstracts Booklet
Speaker bios: SHARP 2024_Speaker’s Bios

We look forward to welcoming you!
Delegate welcome pack from Venue Reading (includes info on accommodation, travel, places to eat in Reading): Delegate Information Pack for Sharp Conference
Map of Whiteknights campus: Whiteknights campus map

SHARP 2024 will explore how books and texts are produced, distributed, and read in global contexts today and in the past. The conference will address how access to book cultures is uneven on many different levels. Taking inspiration from recent work in critical bibliography (Maruca and Ozment, 2022) and transnational print activism (Noorda, Norrick-Rühl, le Roux, 2022) we are seeking papers that will interrogate how book cultures across time can and have been used to resist, question, or otherwise support or reinstate various systems of power and/or oppression.
We encourage contributions from all researchers. SHARP especially encourages submissions from independent scholars, PhD students, and Early Career scholars. We welcome papers and panels exploring book cultures and models of creation, dissemination, and consumption from across the world and in different eras.
Papers, roundtables, and posters linked to the following suggested themes and topics are invited (this list is not exhaustive):

Intersectional Feminist approaches to book cultures
Anti-racist approaches
Textual production and class
Indigenous studies and book history
Intersections between disability studies and book culture
World scripts and non-latin typefaces
Transnational distribution
Translation: trends, networks, advocacy
Multilingual publishing and bookselling
Bookmaking, pedagogy, and bibliography using archives and collections
Social justice, global book cultures, and publishing
Critical and liberation bibliography
Social media and global book cultures
Genre publishing
Secret and surreptitious printing or circulation
Books beyond books
Structures of knowledge; open access; copyright
Citation; co-creators; archives and institutions
Materiality of text and image (both analogue and digital)
New book consumption models; bookselling and book-buying networks

Reading’s renowned collections in book, printing and publishing history, and facilities and technical expertise to explore the making of type and printing processes, will underpin our events. The University of Reading is home to The Archive of British Publishing and Printing, Writers’ and Artists Papers, Lettering, Printing and Graphic Design Collections (includes Isotype, non-latin typeface collection, printing presses, Ephemera, C20 posters).
On Monday and Friday of the conference, in-person delegates will be able to explore our Special Collections and Archives on site, with printing sessions/workshops in the Department of Typography and Graphic Communication, pop-up exhibitions in Special Collections relating to book cultures and publishing, and collections-based workshops led by Reading academics:
Collections and archives – Department of Typography & Graphic Communication (reading.ac.uk)
Collections – Special Collections – Collections – Special Collections (reading.ac.uk)
Format & Attendance
The conference will primarily be in-person, conducted during UK working hours, with online presentation and attendance available for limited sessions only (not all). There will be some online-only sessions specifically for remote attendees. Keynote talks will be accessible for remote attendees to attend, and will be made available after the conference via SHARP. The online attendance rate will be much reduced/minimal. We endeavour to keep costs as low as possible for in-person attendees and will include differential rates to support students/non-waged.
You do not need to be a member of SHARP to submit an abstract; however, you will need to be a member to present or otherwise attend the conference. To join SHARP, please visit this page of their website: https://sharpweb.org/membership
Limited travel grants from SHARP are available for students, independent scholars or other researchers lacking the necessary funding to travel to the conference location. Travel grants are awarded by the organizers of the individual conferences in collaboration with the SHARP treasurer. If you would like to be considered for a travel grant, please indicate this when submitting.
To be part of SHARP 2024, please submit one of the following:
Abstracts and panels: of up to 250 words max for a 20 min talk on a particular topic, for a 90 min panel with 3 speakers. These can be pre-arranged between groups (please include an abstract and title for each paper), or submitted individually. We would like to allow an option for remote attendees who may struggle to access the conference during our time zone to pre-record a screencast, which will be shared on the CBCP website in advance of the conference itself (details tbc).
Roundtables: 60 minute slots featuring up to 5 speakers, delivering short position statements on a theme/topic of no more than 5 minutes in response to questions distributed in advance by the organiser. The bulk of the session should be devoted to discussion. Please include the names of participants, organiser, and the topic you will address (250 words max).
Poster presentations/digital exhibits: Include an abstract of no more than 250 words and a 2-line professional bio of each presenter.
[We will allow attendees delivering 20 minute papers to be part of a roundtable and/or contribute to a poster presentation]
On registration, you will be able to sign-up for collections-based workshops (limited numbers, in-person).
Timetable
Abstracts/roundtables/poster outlines should be sent to “CentreforBookCulturesandPublishing” <lfs19c2@reading.ac.uk> by the end of Friday January 12th 2024.
Please include a 2 line bio, any affiliation, and your email address. Please indicate if you would like to be considered for a travel grant, and also if you intend to present online, rather than in person. This will help our programme committee enormously.
Deliberations of the Programme Committee Jan to February 2024; decisions sent to all candidates by end of Feb 2024.
April 24 Registrations open through conference website/shopping basket

SHARP 2024

SHARP conference 2024 - registration fees
2024-07-01 - 2024-07-05 | University of Reading, Reading, Berkshire, United Kingdom
We are pleased to announce the registration fees for SHARP 2024 which is to be held at the University of Reading from 1-5 July. Registration will go live after Easter, mid April.
We have made a block booking on campus for accommodation: this will be £76.50 a night. Rooms will be released when booking opens.

Package Name
Package Includes
Price £
Rate
Attendee type

Full Week-Long Conference Package (standard rate)
Full conference access Monday – Friday (lunch + coffees)
£290
Early bird rate
Standard

Full Week-Long Conference Package (student/non-waged rate)
Full conference access Monday – Friday (lunch + coffees)
£185
Early bird rate
Student/non-waged in person

Full Week-Long Conference Package (standard rate)
Full conference access Monday – Friday
£350
Normal rate
Standard

Full Week-Long Conference Package (student/non-waged rate)
Full conference access Monday – Friday
£245
Normal rate
Student/non-waged in person

Monday Conference Package
Access to Conference on the Monday only
£40

Standard

Monday Conference Package
Access to Conference on the Monday only
£30

Student/non-waged in person

Friday Conference Package
Access to Conference on the Friday only
£40

Standard

Friday Conference Package
Access to Conference on the Friday only
£30

Student/non-waged in person

Tuesday Conference Package
Access to Conference on the Tuesday only
£80

Standard

Tuesday Conference Package
Access to Conference on the Tuesday only
£65

Student/non-waged in person

Wednesday Conference Package
Access to Conference on the Wednesday only
£80

Standard

Wednesday Conference Package
Access to Conference on the Wednesday only
£65

Student/non-waged in person

Thursday Conference Package
Access to Conference on the Thursday only
£80

Standard

Thursday Conference Package
Access to Conference on the Thursday only
£65

Student/Non-waged in person

Online Rate
Access to keynotes, select roundtables and some panels (limited) (across 5 days)
£80
Early bird rate
Standard

Online Rate
Access to keynotes, select roundtables and some panels (limited) (across 5 days)
£60
Early bird rate
Student/Non-waged

Online Rate
Access to keynotes, select roundtables and some panels (limited) (across 5 days)
£100
Normal rate

Typography Working Seminar: research with collections, 22–26 July 2024
2024-07-22 - 2024-07-26
Spend a week immersed in typographic collections, looking at methodologies for effectively working with and interpreting primary sources, including unconventional material, ephemera, and digital evidence. We will look at the role of materiality and the impact of technologies of document authoring and making across different languages and scripts. Sessions with archival material are paired with practical sessions: demonstrations and hands-on exercises with writing tools in different scripts, and printing equipment across technologies, will give you a direct appreciation of the role of typographic research for text- and publishing-focused disciplines.
Our sessions will be particularly relevant for those working with under-represented scripts, languages, or communities, and those working to address biases in existing literature. This course is suitable for academics, researchers, and individuals preparing for PhD study who are developing a research project, publication, or proposal. Additionally, for those with broader interests, the course will help build skills for qualitative work with archives and constructing narratives from material evidence.
Contributors in the week include Borna Izadpanah, Neelakash Ksetrimayum, Gerry Leonidas, Fiona Ross, and Geoff Wyeth.
To discuss the fit of the course to your interests, and for more information, contact Gerry Leonidas at g.leonidas@reading.ac.uk.

CBCP x OIW webinar series ‘Explorations in Translation for Children’ El Cuento Fantasma/ The Invisible Story
2024-10-16 17:00 - 18:30
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:
This webinar will explore Jaime Gamboa and Wen Hsu Chen’s El Cuento Fantasma, its selection as part of Outside in World’s Reading the Way project, and how it came to be translated by Daniel Hahn for Lantana as The Invisible Story.
This online webinar is free & open to all. To register for the Zoom link, please click here.
The world is full of stories. Some are as long as lizards, others so short that they never even make it to The End. But the invisible story is unlike any other story because no one has ever read it! It lives hidden in the darkest corner of the library, far from where the famous tales, written in gold letters, shine. One day, a blind reader approaches the story’s trembling pages. This reader is unlike any reader the invisible story has ever encountered. And when she runs her fingertips over the book’s white pages, it is astonished by what she finds. A beautifully inclusive tale about sight-loss in which we learn that not all stories are meant to be read with the eyes.
Speakers:
Jaime Gamboa is an award-winning Costa Rican author and musician. His books have been translated into English, Danish, Korean, Japanese, Turkish, Chinese and French.
Wen Hsu Chen is a Costa Rican artist and architect who graduated with BFA Honors from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her watercolor and cut-out paper technique has earned her multiple awards, including the Grand Prize at the NOMA Concours 2008.
Alex Strick is a children’s book author, consultant, reviewer, and co-founder of Outside in World, with a passion for putting children’s views and voices first.
Kyla is a student at New College Worcester, the independent school for students aged 11–19 who are blind or partially sighted. Kyla is an enthusiastic braille reader.
Daniel Hahn is a celebrated British writer, editor and translator. In 2020, he was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to literature and in 2023, he won the Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature.

“Economic, and Not Political”: The Beginnings of the Traditional Market Agreement
2024-10-17 17:15 - 18:30 | Room 127, Edith Morley Building, University of Reading, RG6 6EL, United Kingdom
Speaker: Dr Hyei Jin Kim – CBCP Visiting Research Fellow
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) **Followed by a ‘Welcome back’ social & drinks**
To join via MS Teams, please register here

Hyei Jin’s paper investigates the largely forgotten Traditional Market Agreement (TMA) which has undeniably shaped the global trade of English-language books. Established by the Publishers Association (PA) in 1947, the TMA divided the English-speaking world into British and American markets and granted British publishers the exclusive right to sell their editions across the empire (later the Commonwealth) throughout the 20th century. This talk will discuss the role the PA played in defining and defending the empire market in the 1940s. Examining the PA’s appeals to the British wartime government to promote book exports and its quarrels with American publishers, the talk will illustrate how the PA extracted the “empire market” from the “empire”, the economic from the political, to maintain British publishers’ book exports to dominions and colonies that would soon become independent.
Speaker: Dr Hyei Jin Kim holds a DPhil in English from the University of Oxford. She researches the place of culture in international organisations such as PEN International and UNESCO and the role institutions play in structuring the international book trade. Her current project focuses on the material conditions of literature in English by examining the Traditional Market Agreement, a division of postwar Anglophone publishing territories, and its impact on literary publishing and reading.

Tracing the Genealogy of the Kenyan Political Novel – a Case for the Nationalist Autobiography as its Genesis
2024-11-14 17:15 - 18:00
Speaker: Dr Billy Kahora – Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Bristol

This research seminar will be held online & is free & open to all.
To join via MS Teams, please register here
Drawing on materials from the African Writer’s Series archive at the University of Reading’s Special Collections, Dr Billy Kahora’s seminar will trace links between the early Kenyan political novel and the country’s nationalist biographies/cultural ethnographies – works which were the first book-length Kenyan publications. His talk will focus especially on Jomo Kenyatta’s Facing Mt Kenya. Dr Kahora will illustrate how the narrative choices of such non-fiction works were just as crucial to the early Kenyan novel form as their thematic political content.
About our speaker:
Dr Billy Kahora is writer of fiction and non-fiction from Kenya. He has written a non-fiction novella The True Story Of David Munyakei and a short story collection titled The Cape Cod Bicycle War and Other Stories. His short fiction and creative non-fiction have appeared in Chimurenga, McSweeney’s, Granta Online and Kwani? and he has twice been shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing. He is also a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Bristol. His research examines narrative voice, mimesis and multivocality in the novel (with an emphasis on African and Kenyan forms), realisms, non-fiction and creative writing teaching pedagogies. He has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Manchester, an MSc Creative Writing from University of Edinburgh, and a Journalism and English degree from Rhodes University, South Africa. He is a past recipient of the Chevening Scholarship, an Iowa Writer’s Fellowship and the President’s Award at the University of Manchester.

Unruly Books: Translating hybrid picturebooks for teens and adults
2024-12-04 17:00 - 18:30
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:
Unruly Books: Translating hybrid picturebooks for teens and adults. In conversation with Claudia Zoe Bedrick and Eugenia Mello
This online webinar is free & open to all. To register for the Zoom link, please click here.
This webinar focuses on Unruly Books, the picturebook imprint launched in 2021 to bring category-defying ‘hybrid’ international books – combining elements of the graphic novel, picture book, and art book, with ample text, sophisticated conception, and challenging or more complex subject matter – for teens and adults to the US. Publisher Claudia Zoe Bedrick and designer Eugenia Mello will discuss how the imprint came about, what it is seeking to do, and key books from the catalogue and how they were translated. The conversation will explore how the Unruly approach to translating includes ideas and editorial practices, book design and visual experimentation, and, ultimately, offers a challenge to assumptions about the categories of books for adults and books for children in English-language publishing.
Speakers
Claudia Zoe Bedrick is the publisher, editor, and art director of Enchanted Lion Books, an award-winning, independent publisher based in Brooklyn. Her work is nourished every day by an abiding sense of wonder and a deep appreciation for the spirit and creativity of children everywhere.
Eugenia Mello is an occasional art director at Enchanted Lion/Unruly and a core member of the team for strategic and artistic development. She is an illustrator and graphic designer from Buenos Aires, Argentina currently living and drawing in NYC. She is passionate about rhythm, movement, and feelings, and uses colors and shapes for things that are difficult to put into words. She strives to make images that express feelings and moments in a musical way.

Theatre Translation from an Archival Perspective: Franca Rame and Surtitles
2024-12-12 17:15 - 18:30 | Room G74, Edith Morley Building, University of Reading, RG6 6EL
Speaker: Dr Anna Saroldi – Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Durham

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

To join us in person come along to Room G74, Edith Morley building, University of Reading (Whiteknights campus)
To join via MS Teams, please register here

Dr Anna Saroldi’s paper focuses on Franca Rame (1929-2013), one of the most renowned theatre practitioners of the second half of the 20th century. Together with her artistic partner and husband, Dario Fo (1926-2016), she wrote, directed, and performed more than thirty plays, among them the internationally acclaimed Accidental Death of an Anarchist and We won’t pay! We won’t’ pay!. This paper illuminates Rame’s pioneering role in the realm of audiovisual translation, with a specific focus on the transformative impact of theatre surtitles on her and Fo’s creative legacy, thanks to archival research at MusALab Verona. Rame’s agency in the translation process is explored, emphasizing her instrumental role in achieving international recognition for their work, despite the predominant acclaim reserved to Fo. A core case study delves into Rame’s performance of “It’s all Bed, Board, and Church” at the Joyce Theater, NY, in 1986, showcasing this seminal moment in theatre and political history, where surtitles played a pivotal role. A previously unidentified recording of this performance, archived at Emerson College, Boston, serves as a valuable resource, allowing for the examination of theatre translation as a live performance, shedding light on the performative aspects of translation (Marinetti, De Francisci 2022).
About our speaker:
Dr Anna Saroldi is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Durham. Previously, Anna lectured in Italian at the University of Oxford, where she obtained a DPhil in English Literature. Anna’s research focuses on translation and collaborative practices across English, Italian, and French in the 20th and 21st century. Anna has published on self-translation, heteroglossia, and retranslation from an archival perspective, in journals such as Ticontre, Translation in Society (and forthcoming in The Italianist).

Historic Presses Workshop, 16 December 2024
2024-12-16 17:30 - 19:30 | Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading (Whiteknights Campus), 2 Earley Gate, RG6 6BZ, United Kingdom
We invite you to join us to celebrate the launch of the Historic Presses Workshop at the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading. The launch will feature demonstrations of letterpress printing and lithographic printing from stone.
To join us in person, come along to the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading (Whiteknights campus), 2 Earley Gate, Reading RG6 6BZ from 5.30pm on 16 December 2024.
This new printing workshop has been set up so that students and researchers can use and study an unusual and distinctive collection of historic printing presses. It comprises three research-led reconstructions: a one-pull press; a common press and a lithographic pole press each made by Alan May. These are complemented by examples of the major hand presses made and used initially in the nineteenth century, by a Harry Rochat etching press, and by a more conventional press for printing from lithographic stones. The workshop includes a collection of C19 wooden type and metal type for handsetting. A unique collection of world script metal type includes Chinese and Japanese, Cambodian, Tibetan, Bengali, Georgian and Syriac as well as Egyptian Hieroglyphs.
The Presses: Research-led reconstructions made by Alan May:

Reconstructed One-Pull Press
This press was reconstructed following Alan May’s research into how Gutenberg is likely to have printed the 42-line Bible, that is, one page at a time. Alan also considered a drawing of a press made by Albrecht Dürer in the design of the press. See Alan May’s account of how he made the press, and links to his research: https://makerpress.co.uk/the-gutenberg-press/ The press featured in the 2008 BBC film, ‘The Machine that Made Us’, fronted by Stephen Fry.
Reconstructed Common Press
The term ‘Common Press’ refers to a relief printing press made substantially in wood but with a heavy metal screw used in its impression mechanism. It appeared near the end of the fifteenth century and continued in use with only minor changes until the introduction of the iron press at the end of the eighteenth century. Alan May has made several reconstructions of this press, both full-size and small scale as he explains: https://makerpress.co.uk/the-common-press/ This press featured in the BBC series ‘Catherine the Great’ in 2019.
Reconstructed Lithographic Pole Press
This is a reconstruction the Senefelder Pole Press illustrated in Vollstandiges Lebrbuch der Steindruckerey (Munich and Vienna 1818, 1821). See Alan May’s account of the making of the press and related research: https://makerpress.co.uk/the-senefelder-pole-press/ To fit within the new workshop, and with guidance from Alan May and Michael Twyman we have reduced the height of the pole. This has not affected the working of the press.
Stanhope Press, unnamed
Acquired from Norfolk Museums, 2013.
John Brooks small Stanhope Press
Originally used by Parnells of Reading, a letterpress printing firm.
Wood & Co Albion Press, 1863, no. 7457
Acquired via Colin Banks bequest
Somerville & Crombie Columbian Press, c 1840
Acquired locally, mid-1960s
Hopkinson & Cope Albion Press, 1853
Acquired from Garratt & Atkinson, process engravers, Ealing, London when they closed down, mid-1960s.
Wood & Sharwoods Atlas Press, c. 1940s
Acquired from Bradley & Sons Ltd, Printers, Reading.
Lion Press, 1866
Acquired from the Type Archive, 2023.
‘Golding Jobber, no. 6’ Treadle Press, 1888
Acquired 2005 from Roy Mac’Neil, local printer, Reading.
Further information about the The Historic Presses Workshop:
What is distinctive and exciting about the workshop is that students and researchers can work with and experience the three major printing processes as well see historic examples of each printing process in the Lettering, Printing and Graphic Design Collections, including everyday life examples in the Centre for Ephemera Studies.
The workshop is set up so that some of the presses can be used by students undertaking modules that have been designed to encourage their use. Some of the presses are for demonstration purposes only, led by master printer Geoff Wyeth, and some presses are not yet usable.
We welcome visitors by appointment, and plan to have themed workshop events and demonstrations. Our very first demonstration by Geoff Wyeth, of the lithographic pole press delighted delegates at the SHARP 2024 conference many of whom had no idea how lithographic printing from stone was done.
We are grateful to the University of Reading for allocating and space and for refurbishment; to the School of Arts and Communication Design for supporting moving of presses and their maintenance and restoration to working order by AMR Press. Special thanks to Geoff Wyeth for workshop design and to Jude Brindley for her advice and guidance on health and safety.

Translations’ copyright/translators’ copyright: a history of power imbalance in the Italian book trade
2025-02-13 17:00 - 18:00 | Room 124, Edith Morley building, University of Reading (Whiteknights campus), RG6 6EL
Speaker: Anna Lanfranchi – Teaching Fellow in Translation & Transcultural Studies & Italian at the University of Warwick

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

To join us in person come along to Room 124, Edith Morley building, University of Reading (Whiteknights campus)
To join via MS Teams, please register here

Seminar topic:
In the second half of the 19th century, international legal frameworks gave to the authors of literary works a new level control over the translation and publication of texts across national borders. While recognising the status of translations as original works in their own merit, authors and translators faced different challenges in the rapidly changing transnational landscape. Drawing on research on the post-Unification Italian publishing industry, the paper discusses the different treatment of translations’ and translators’ copyright in the first half of the 20th century, and explores the consequences of such power imbalance for the structural and professional development of the Italian book trade.
About our speaker:
Anna Lanfranchi is a Teaching Fellow in Translation and Transcultural Studies and Italian at the University of Warwick (UK). Her research focuses on transnational book history from the 19th century to the present day. She has published on Italian translation and publishing history, wartime book programmes, and intellectuals in the book trade. Her first monograph, Translations and Copyright in the Italian Book Trade: Publishers, Agents, and the State (1900-1947) (Palgrave 2024) explores the legal frameworks and the professional networks informing the negotiation of translation rights to British and US works in Italy in the first half of the 20th century.

Type, technology and translation: A case study of Chinese metal type
2025-02-26 17:15 - 18:00 | Room T4, Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading (Whiteknights Campus), RG6 6BZ
Speaker: Xunchang Cheng – CBCP Visiting Research Fellow
This research seminar is a hybrid event and is free & open to all.

To join us in person come along to Room T4, Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading (Whiteknights campus)
To join via MS Teams, please register here

Seminar topic:
Xunchang’s talk investigates two sets of Chinese metal type recently acquired by the University of Reading collections, sourced from the St Bride Library and The Type Archive in London. These collections provide rare material evidence of missionary-led Chinese metal type production and offer insights into the adaptation of Western type-making techniques for Chinese script. Through material analysis, print testing, and historical comparisons, this presentation will explore the origin, production techniques, typeform characteristics and storage methods of these two founts.
The project aims to establish a methodology for testing and analysing historical Chinese founts, facilitating their application in broader typographic and historical research. In addition, the study explores the potential for reusing these types in today’s typesetting applications. By combining material study with contemporary typographic experimentation, this project contributes to a deeper understanding of the evolution of Chinese type-making and its cross-cultural significance in the 19th century.
About our speaker:
Xunchang Cheng is a multilingual typeface designer, researcher, documentary director and exhibitions curator. His current research primarily focuses on exploring the evolution of Chinese typeforms up to the 20th century from the perspective of typeface designers.

Book launch: Sophie Heywood's "Children’s Publishing in Cold War France: Hachette in the Age of Surveillance and Control"
2025-03-24 17:00 - 18:00 | Room 125, Edith Morley Building, University of Reading
Join us in person or online on Monday, 24 March 2025 for the launch event for Sophie Heywood’s new monograph:
Children’s Publishing in Cold War France: Hachette in the Age of Surveillance and Control (Bloomsbury, Perspectives on Children’s Literature series, 2025)
Author: Sophie Heywood (CBCP/ University of Reading)
Discussant: Lucy Pearson (Newcastle University)
Chair: Nicola Wilson (CBCP/ University of Reading)
This is a hybrid event & is free & open to all

To join us in person come along to Room 125, Edith Morley building, University of Reading (Whiteknights campus)
To join us via MS Teams, please register here

Exploring the history of Cold War censorship legislation and its impact on the French publishing industry for children, this open access book focuses on the publisher Hachette to detail how it dominated the country’s new context of surveillance and control.
Using extensive new multilingual archive material including legal and business records and US State Department files, Sophie Heywood traces both the history of the French Communist Party’s (PCF) and anti-comics activists’ efforts to prevent American ‘propaganda’ reaching the hands of children, and Hachette’s strategic and editorial responses. Children’s Publishing in Cold War France covers such events as the campaign waged against the global multi-media phenomenon Tarzan; the impact of Cold War tensions on Hachette’s publishing of Disney books and comics in French; and studies the translation of series fiction from Nancy Drew to The Famous Five, where self-censorship could be a radical and creative process.
Children’s Publishing in Cold War France presents a timely historical study of how states and political campaigners seek to control children’s access to culture, and the legacies of such conflicts.
The book is open access and can be downloaded for free (from 20 February 2025) here.
Author: Sophie Heywood is Associate Professor in French and a founding co-director of the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing at the University of Reading, UK. She specializes in the history of comparative children’s literature and publishing. Her first monograph was a literary and publishing history of iconic French children’s author, the Comtesse de Ségur (Manchester University Press, 2011), and between 2016 and 2018 she led an international research network on the impact of the ’68 years on cultures of childhood, The Children’s ’68, funded by the STUDIUM/Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellowship programme.
Discussant: Lucy Pearson is Senior Lecturer in Children’s Literature at Newcastle University, and leader of Newcastle’s Children’s Literature Unit. Her research focuses on children’s publishing and the development of children’s literature since the mid twentieth century. She is the author of The Making of Modern Children’s Literature in Britain: Publishing and Criticism in the 1960s and 1970s (Ashgate, 2013) and is currently working on a new history of the UK’s Carnegie Medal.

The Education of Things: Mechanical Literacy in British Children's Literature, 1762–1860
2025-04-30 17:15 - 18:00 | Room T4, Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading, University of Reading, RG6 6BZ
Speaker: Dr Elizabeth Hoiem – Assistant Professor, Illinois School of Information Sciences

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

To join us in person come along to Room T4, Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading (Whiteknights campus), RG6 6BZ
To join via MS Teams, please register here

Seminar topic:
By the close of the eighteenth century, learning to read and write became closely associated with learning about the material world, and a vast array of games and books from the era taught children how to comprehend the physical world of “things.” Hoiem’s 2024 book analyses the class politics behind the playful literature, toys, and learning aids created to teach reading alongside science, technology, and economics. argues that with the rise of manufacturing, skills such as tinkering, observation, and experimentation became essential new literacies for an industrial economy. To maintain their social position, wealthier families taught their children “mechanical literacies,” or the ability to interpret the laws governing how things are manipulated, created, purchased, manufactured, and exchanged. To do this, families incorporated artisan practices into their nurseries and classrooms, teaching their children to play-act the work of making things. Playful learning thus offered children of leisure a way to acquire mechanical literacies by handling books, games, crafts, and learning aids as physical proxies for immersive experiences with work, while remaining protected from the hardships of child labour.
In this talk, Dr Hoiem compares educational materials created to teach reading, writing, and political economy to privileged children with books and lessons developed by author-educators active in British working-class movements for universal suffrage and political reform. Instead of teaching mechanical literacy through play, radical working-class authors reclaimed manual labor as a legitimate source of knowledge about the material world. They developed manipulable learning aids to teach not only writing but the equitable distribution of resources, preparing youth through mechanical literacy to analyse political systems and suggest new governing laws. Making and manipulating material texts—combining words and putting things together—signaled children’s potential to make knowledge and design machines, and to fully participate in political and economic systems. But manipulating toys with texts held different meanings for different communities, reflecting divergent beliefs about whose children are capable of rational thought and political participation.
About our speaker:
Elizabeth Massa Hoiem is assistant professor at the Illinois School of Information Sciences and a visiting fellow at the University of Leeds, Center for the History and Philosophy of Science. Her work draws on theoretical and historical perspectives from children literature and material culture studies, history of education, book history, history of science and technology, working-class history, and literacy studies. She received the Justin G Schiller Prize for her book, The Education of Things (University of Massachusetts Press, 2024), and the 2019 Judith Plotz Emerging Scholar Award for her article on 1830s radical broadsides, songs, prayers, and journalism for working children. Her article on representations of slavery across 200 years of sugar production stories for children won the 2021 Illinois Humanities Research Institute Prize for Best Faculty Research. She is currently starting a new book project, The Earth’s Childhood: Geology, Deep Time, and the Origins of Life in Children’s Books, 1860 to 1960, and another project on production stories, or stories about how everyday things are made.

3rd CBCP Postgraduate Symposium, 29 May 2025
2025-05-29 09:00 - 17:30 | Global Studies Lounge & Room 227, Edith Morley Building, University of Reading (Whiteknights campus), RG6 6EL
The 3rd CBCP Postgraduate Symposium will be held at the University of Reading on Thursday May 29th, in the Global Studies Lounge & Room 227 in the Edith Morley Building. The Symposium will be an occasion for PhD students and Postdoctoral researchers to showcase their research while engaging with the wider community of researchers within the CBCP.
No cost to attend. Lunch and refreshments will be provided.
Registration has now closed.
9.00 – 9:15 am Arrival and refreshments (provided) (Global Studies Lounge)
9:15 – 9: 20 am Welcome note and Introduction (Global Studies Lounge)
9:25 – 10:55 am
Panel I: Multilingual Readership (Chair: Cristina De Luca) (Global Studies Lounge)

Sarah Bramao Ramos (University of Hong Kong), “Reading across, reading together: Multilingual Readers of Manchu-Language Books in Qing China” (online)
Thalatha Gunasekara (University of Kelaniya), “An exploration of the translation theories, methods, procedures, and strategies employed by Sugathapala De Silva in his Sinhala translations of The Gadfly, Death is Part of the Process, and ‘Funny Boy’” (online)
Elena Hueso Garcia (University of Valencia), “Multimodal Critical Literacy in a Multilingual Classroom: Exploring Migration and Refugee Narratives through Visual and Textual Resources” (online)
Helena Moros-Gracia (Jaume I University), “Words, worlds, and identities: Young Adult literature in multilingual contexts” (online)

Panel II: Transforming formats and approaches in Children’s Literature (Chair: Emma Page) (Room 227)

Pamela Ellayah (Le Mans University), “Rediscovering Margaret Wise Brown’s Picture Books with Contemporary French Translations”(in person)
Isabel Lopes Coelho (Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo), “Translating formats: the development of a YA literary digital artefact from a traditional book project”(online)
Cheeno Sayuno (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), “Mediatization of Philippine Children’s Literary Production: Experiences in Storybook Development, Distribution, and Consumption in Pandemic Learning Environments” (online)
Ginny Xu (Tilburg University), “The Disappearing Chinese YA Literature” (online)

10:55 – 11:10 am Coffee/tea break (provided) (Global Studies Lounge)
11: 15 – 12: 45 pm
Panel I: Publishing and the mediation of national identity I (Chair: Emma Page) (Global Studies Lounge)

Clara Défachel (Univeristy of St. Andrews & University of Sterling), “Staging Arabics and Frenches on the page in French translations: the ‘Collection Khamsa’” (in person)
Sulthana Nasrin (Jawaharlal Nehru University), “Book Trade in Colonial South India: Tensions between the Missionary and Native Print Worlds” (online)
Yueran Wang (University of Leeds), “Translating and Publishing Modern Mainland Chinese Literature in English: A Case Study of Penguin Random House” (online)

Panel II: Cultural transformations in print (Chair: Abeera Zishan) (Room 227)

Hanan Alshawi (University of Reading), “The development of pilgrimage booklets 1900 to 2020” (in person)
Yangyang Liu (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), “Vertical or Horizontal: The Debate on Chinese Printing Directionality and the Unheard Voices” (online)
Simi Nath (University of Delhi), “On Readership After the Advent of Print in Assam” (online)
Jennifer Taylor (University of Reading), “Printing Eve: Gendered Performance and Book Design in Perrault’s Adam ou la création de l’homme (1697)” (in person)

12:45 pm – 1:55 pm Lunch (provided)
2:00 – 3:00 pm Guest Talk (Chair: Cristina De Luca) (Global Studies Lounge)
Mariangela Dicillo (Digital Sales Specialist for the Mondadori Group – Audiobooks) – (online)
3:05 – 3:20 pm Afternoon refreshments (provided) (Global Studies Lounge)
3:25 – 4:55 pm
Panel I: Women in Publishing: Workers, translators, gatekeepers (Chair: Pritha Mukherjee) (Global Studies Lounge)

Izzy Barrett-Lally (Royal Holloway, University of London), “A Comparison of Anglophone and Francophone Literary BookTube: Identifying Interpretative Codes and Communities” (online)
Maria Belén Riveiro (University of Buenos Aires), “An International Comparative Approach to Women Publishers” (online)
Patience Haggin (Independent Scholar), “Virtually No Rights at all for Herself”: Anna Maria Ortese and Her Translators”(online)
Josephine Murray (University of East Anglia), “Patricia Crampton: advocate for translators’ rights, ‘freedom fighter, risk taker and forger of the future’ (2017)” (online)

Panel II: Publishing and the mediation of national identity II (Chair: Cristina De Luca) (Room 227)

Fatih Aşan (Boğaziçi University), “From Constantinople with Love:How an Ottoman Printer Became a European Sensation” (online)
Andrea Romanzi (University of Milano & University of Venice, Ca’ Foscari), “Translating Heimskringla: Cultural Identity and Power in Early Modern Scandinavia” (in person)
Ekaterina Shatalova (Aarhus University), “Border Crossing in Russian and Ukrainian editions of Yuri Nikitinsky’s Vovka Who Saddled the Bomb” (online)
Deborah Lyons (University of Birmingham), “Reading Between the Leaves: Transcultural Print Histories of Zoë Wicomb’s ‘In the Botanic Gardens’” (online)

5:00 – 5:30 pm Closing remarks and farewell (Global Studies Lounge)
If you would like the Teams links to be able to listen to any of the talks remotely, please contact Cristina De Luca or Emma Page.

Typographic Landscape Research Network (TLRN) seminar, 2 June
2025-06-02 18:00 - 19:00 | Room T4, Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading (Whiteknights Campus), RG6 6BZ
You are cordially invited to join the upcoming Typographic Landscape Research Network (TLRN) seminar on Monday 2nd June, at 6pm UK time:

The technology-supported exploration of linguistic landscapes with Lingscape with Dr Christoph Purschke.

This research seminar is free & open to all. Join us in person in the University of Reading’s Department of Typography, Room T4. To join via MS Teams, please click here.

This presentation is for you if you are interested in learning and discussing how large volumes of image data (in this case thousands of photos of text in urban spaces) can be captured, stored, geo-referenced, analysed and tagged in an open source citizen science project.

Abstract:
For almost nine years now, the participatory research platform Lingscape has offered a way to explore linguistic landscapes with technical support. The various projects hosted on the platform have not only significantly expanded the analytic capabilities of the application, but have also led to the introduction of new features in response to community requests – to address different usage scenarios. In this talk, I will trace the evolution of the project and the challenges of developing it into a collaborative research platform. I will also discuss Lingscape as an example of a technical tool for language linguistic landscapes research in the context of current technological developments.

About our speaker:
Dr Christoph Purschke is Associate Professor in Computational Linguistics and Head of the Culture & Computation Lab at the Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences at the Université du Luxembourg.

CBCP workshop: Re-vision: On re-publishing & re-design, 1 July 2025
2025-07-01 10:00 - 16:15 | Room T4, Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading (Whiteknights Campus), RG6 6BZ
This workshop brings together creatives and practitioners involved in the art and business of republishing to explore the social, artistic, political and economic dynamics of bringing previously published texts back to life in different historical, linguistic, textual, and geographical contexts for new markets and audiences.
The workshop is free to attend. If you would like to come in person, please click here to select tickets.
Refreshments (incl. lunch) will be provided throughout the day. If you have any dietary or accessibility requirements, please email the Centre for Book Cultures & Publishing at cbcp@reading.ac.uk.
Workshop Programme
10.00-10.15am: Refreshments & Welcome
Republishing:
10.15-11.15am: Social justice and republishing Ethel Carnie Holdsworth (Jess Samuel and Amber Stevenson, University of Exeter & Jenny Harper, University of Reading).
Chair: Dr Nicola Wilson
11.15-11.30am: Refreshments
11.30am-1.00pm:

Designing co-editions on Marie Neurath with Quinto Quarto (Prof Sue Walker, University of Reading)
Ethics and republishing children’s books (Dr Darren Chetty, UCL)
Lurid publishing: Reprints from a pedagogical perspective (Dr D-M Withers, University of Exeter)
Chair: Dr Sophie Heywood

1.00-2.00pm: Lunch
Industry:
2.00-3.00pm:

The backlist from the literary agent’s perspective (Norah Perkins, Curtis Brown Heritage Division)
Small publishers & audiobooks (Kate Bland, Spiracle Audiobooks)
Chair: TBC

3.00-3.15pm: Break
Forms:
3.15-4.15pm:

Re-imagining Ethel Carnie Holdsworth’s This Slavery as a Graphic Novel (Sophie and Scarlett Rickard)
Re-translations: amplifying discourse [online] (Prof Gerry Leonidas, University of Reading)
Chair: Prof David Brauner

Book launch: Nicola Wilson's "Recommended! The influencers who changed how we read"
2025-07-15 16:00 - 17:00
Join us or online on Tuesday, 15 July 2025 (4pm-5pm BST) for the launch event for Nicola Wilson’s new monograph:
Recommended! The influencers who changed how we read
(Holland House Books, 2025)
Author: Nicola Wilson (CBCP / University of Reading)
Discussant: Claire Battershill (University of Toronto)
Chair: Sophie Heywood (CBCP / University of Reading)
This event is free & open to all.
To join us via MS Teams, please register here.
Before Reese Witherspoon and Zoella’s Book Clubs, there was Oprah Winfrey and Richard and Judy. And before them, there was Hugh Walpole and the Book Society. This is the story of Britain’s first celebrity book club and the judges who changed how we read.
For forty years between 1929-1969, the Book Society chose from the best of world literature to mail out one book a month – fiction, history, travel, or biography – to subscribers in over thirty countries. The judges established what a good ‘book club book’ looked like: well-written, entertaining, informative; worth investing your time and money in, not too highbrow nor obscure. Making book-buying easier, they started a revolution. And the legacy of their taste is still with us on bookshelves today.
Hugh Walpole, J. B. Priestley, Sylvia Lynd, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Edmund Blunden were the literary influencers of their day; household names whose personal lives, affairs, and politics informed their recommendations, mixing the personal and professional; social history with the domestic; love, disappointment, and war. They made global bestsellers with books that saw readers through Empire and the growth of fascism and antisemitism, the Great Depression, Spanish Civil War, and World War Two.
Recommended! explores how a group of writers shook up the interwar book world, changing forever how we buy and think about books.
“A deeply researched, stylishly written piece of narrative history, full of detail and telling vignettes. The organisation – around the five characters at the heart of the Book Society – works wonderfully, giving an emotional richness to the story.
An enormous pleasure to read, while also deepening immeasurably my understanding of the literary business of the interwar period out beyond the well-walked squares of Bloomsbury.”
Dennis Duncan, Index, A History of the
Recommended! – The Book Society 1929-69

Author:
Dr Nicola Wilson is Associate Professor of Book and Publishing Studies at the University of Reading, co-director of the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing, and a founding director of the Modernist Archives Publishing Project. Her research is in the history of reading, book history, and working-class writing. Her first book was Home in British Working-Class Fiction (Routledge, 2015) – reviewed in the TLS as an important contribution to the study of working-class writing – and she is co-author of Scholarly Adventures in the Digital Humanities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). She has edited three academic books including, most recently, The Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing, 1900-2020 (2024), edits an Elements strand for Cambridge University Press on ‘Women, Publishing, and Book Cultures’. Over many years, Nicola has worked to get the writings of Lancashire mill-woman Ethel Carnie Holdsworth back into print.
Discussant:
Dr Claire Battershill is an Assistant Professor jointly appointed in the Faculty of Information and the Department of English at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the history and future of the book. Specifically, her work examines relationships between feminist experimental publishing, literary aesthetics, and practices of book making in 20th and 21st-century literature.
Professor Battershill is a Co-Director of the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP), a critical digital archive of early 20th-century publishers’ records, the author of a collection of short stories, Circus (McClelland & Stewart, 2014) and the Co-Creator of ‘Make Believe,’ a collaborative research-creation project funded by the Canada Council for the Arts. Her most recent books are Women and Letterpress Printing: Gendered Impressions (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom (revised 2nd edition, Bloomsbury, 2022).
Book details:
Recommended! The influencers who changed how we read
Format: Hardback (300 pages)
ISBN: 978-1-7391047-5-7
Price: £14.99
Tel: 0845 862 1730
Email: sales@signaturebooksuk.com
Holland House Books: Recommended! | Holland House Books
Publication Date: 26th June 2025

CBCP Modernist Editing Symposium, 23 September 2025
2025-09-23 10:30 - 16:15 | Room T4, Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading (Whiteknights Campus), RG6 6BZ
This symposium brings together leading scholars and practitioners in modernist textual criticism and scholarly editing. Organised by Dr Buxi Duan and Lawrence Jones at the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing (CBCP), with support from the Samuel Beckett Research Centre and the Bibliographical Society UK, the event explores how scholarly editions of modernist texts can better preserve and reflect their dynamic evolution – from manuscript and typescript to first editions, serial publications, and comprehensive scholarly editions.
With CBCP’s commitment to examining book and publishing cultures, as well as the political and material conditions of textual production, this symposium focuses on the key issue of how editorial theory and practice have shaped these cultures and the modernist texts we read today. Our speakers will discuss how they respond to publishing contexts, editorial interventions, and book cultures reflected in the many editions of the works they are editing – and how, as 21st-century readers and researchers, we might critically evaluate these often-competing editions of modernist texts, especially those that remain or become controversial.
This in-person symposium is free to attend. However, due to limited capacity, please click here to reserve your tickets. Because of the nature of the presentations, which involve discussions of unpublished materials and in-progress editorial work, we regret that online participation is not possible on this occasion.
To join us, please register here.
Refreshments (incl. lunch – vegetarian & vegan) will be provided. If you have any dietary or accessibility requirements, please email the Centre for Book Cultures & Publishing at cbcp@reading.ac.uk.
We are delighted to announce that, thanks to the generous conference subvention provided by the Bibliographical Society UK, four travel grants of up to £50 will be available to PGRs and ECRs who do not have institutional support to attend this in-person symposium. If you would like to be considered for this financial support, please send a short message to Dr Buxi Duan (b.duan@reading.ac.uk) by Monday, 1 September 2025 at 5pm, describing how you expect this symposium to benefit your research project. Decisions will be communicated on Monday 8 September 2025.
Please note that campus parking is limited, and availability cannot be guaranteed.
Image: Typescript with handwritten annotation for Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf from the Hogarth Press archive. Courtesy of the Modernist Archives Publishing Project
Programme
10.30-10.45am: Refreshments & Welcome
10.45-12.00pm: Modernist Authorship in Scholarly Editions (20mins each + 15mins Q&A)

Dr Chris Mourant (University of Birmingham), editor of A Passage to India, The Cambridge Edition of the Fiction of E.M. Forster
Dr Gareth Mills, editor of Doom of Youth, OUP Wyndham Lewis
Dr Wim Van Mierlo (Loughborough University) – ‘Modernist Editing in Perspective’

12.00-12.15pm: Coffee break
12.15-1.00pm: Launch Event of the Digital Anon (Virginia Woolf) (30mins + 15mins Q&A)
Dr Joshua Phillips (University of Oxford), Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
1.00-1.45pm: Lunch (provided)
1.45-3:00pm: Editorial Frameworks & Scholarly Editions (20mins each + 15mins Q&As)

Dr Barbara Cooke (Loughborough University), Co-executive Editor of Oxford Waugh
Dr Becky Bowler (Keele University), General Editor of Edinburgh Sinclair
Prof Bryony Randall (University of Glasgow), Co-General Editor of Cambridge Woolf

3.00-3.15pm: Coffee/tea break (provided)
3.15-4.00pm: Roundtable: Challenges & New Perspectives in Modernist Editing

Panel: Prof Mark Nixon, Prof Steven Matthews, Dr Wim Van Mierlo, Dr Buxi Duan
Chair: Prof Nicola Wilson

4.00-4.15pm: Wrap up followed by an informal CBCP social/drinks at Park House (located on the university campus)
To join us, please register here.

CBCP x OIW webinar: Building a Global Youth Literature Collection 101
2025-10-23 17:00 - 18:30
‘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 23rd October at 5pm UK time we will be in conversation with the leaders of the project Building a Global Youth Literature Collection 101, sponsored by The Global Literature in Libraries Initiative.

To join via MS Teams, please register here.

The impact of global events is unmistakably apparent in our daily lives, yet Americans, especially children and teenagers, know little of world events and cultures. Moreover, those best positioned to spark their learning — particularly librarians, who are charged with bringing the knowledge of the world even to their littlest patrons — are ill-equipped to help them. Shockingly, only a handful of accredited U.S. library schools even offer courses in international youth literature.
The Building a Global Youth Literature Collection 101 website is intended to serve as a toolkit for librarians, but also for others who wish to learn more about youth literature — especially translations — from other countries. A global collection helps librarians serve communities with families from different countries and cultures, helps children develop greater international understanding, opens avenues for curiosity, and creates opportunities for learning from counterparts abroad.
Used well, these books can open windows, unlock doors, and serve as mirrors. To this end we provide curated booklists created by librarians, subject matter experts, and community contributors in the Starter Kit and aggregate relevant web-based materials in the resource-rich Hub. Together, they are a one-stop shop for the global youth literature novice, and the project leaders hope that even those already familiar with this literature will discover something new.
Speakers:
Dr. Annette Y. Goldsmith is the librarian at the Levy Library, Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel in Los Angeles. She is the founding editor of the online children’s literature journal, The Looking Glass. An international youth literature specialist, she teaches online graduate classes in children’s and young adult literature and librarianship, most recently for the Kent State University Information School.
Dr. Marc Aronson is Associate Professor of Practice, Library and Information Science, at the Rutgers School of Communication and Information. He has worked in the field of literature for younger readers for more than thirty years as an author, editor, speaker, publisher, and critic. He is the only person to have been a winner or finalist for both of the American Library Association’s prizes for excellence in youth nonfiction as both an author and as an editor.

David Jacobson is a journalist, author and Japanese translator. His award-winning picture book biography, Are You an Echo? The Lost Poetry of Misuzu Kaneko, introduced the life and work of a beloved Japanese children’s poet to English-language readers. He is currently writing a biography of Jella Lepman, founder of the International Youth Library and the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY).

Panel discussion: Bernardine Evaristo in Translation, 5th November 2025
2025-11-05 16:30 - 18:30 | Global Study Lounge, 2nd floor, Edith Morley Building, University of Reading (Whiteknights campus), RG6 6EL, RG6 6EL
On 6 November 2025, the University of Reading will host an International Symposium on the work of Booker Prize-winning author, Bernardine Evaristo. It will be the first academic symposium dedicated to her work. (For more information about the symposium, click here.)
Before the main symposium begins, a special panel dedicated to discussing Evaristo’s work in translation and adaptation will be held on Wednesday 5 November from 4.30-6.30pm (GMT). Our four international panellists for this event and the titles of their talks are as follows:

“Girl, Woman, Other… Readers: Translation and Reception in Serbia”
Emilija Lipovšek, Academy of Applied Studies Belgrade (Serbia)
“Bernardine Evaristo in Polish: Prototyping inclusivity in translation”
Bartosz Wójcik, Maria Curie Skłodowska University (Poland)
“From Girl, Woman, Other to Dekle, ženska, druga_i: translating gender”
Katja Zakrajsek (Slovenia)
“Translating/Adapting Bernardine Evaristo’s (Short) Fiction: From Identity Fragmentation to a Multimodal Transformative Storytelling of Subversive Liminalities”
Ester Gendusa, University of Palermo (Italy)

Welcome: Professor Daniela La Penna, Head of School of Humanities and Co-Director of the Centre for Book Cultures & Publishing at the University of Reading
Chair: Dr Nicola Abram, University of Reading
The event is free to attend and will be held in person and online.
To register for a ticket to join us in person, click here.
(Please note: The venue for the panel discussion is the Global Study Lounge, 2nd floor, Edith Morley Building, University of Reading, RG6 6EL)
To register for a ticket to join us online, click here.
More information on our speakers:
Emilija Lipovšek Defended doctoral thesis entitled ‘Postcolonial London: City and Identity’ at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade, Serbia in 2015. Has participated in a number of international conferences with presentations and published papers on postcolonial authors and novels (including Evaristo’s Lara, Soul Tourists), literary and cultural tourism, industrial cultural heritage. Works as a Senior Lecturer of English Language at the College of Tourism, Academy of Applied Studies Belgrade, Serbia and has held several seminars on postcolonial literature at the University of Bamberg in Germany.
Bartosz Wójcik is the author of Afro-Caribbean Poetry in English: Cultural Traditions (2015) and a member of the Polish Literary Translators Association (http://stl.org.pl/profil/bartosz-wojcik/). Published translations of prose include Diana McCaulay (Jamaica), Kevin Jared Hosein (Trinidad and Tobago), and Nathan McCall (USA), as well as poetry by Lauren K. Alleyne (Trinidad / USA), Jacqueline Bishop (Jamaica), Stewart Brown (UK), Carol Ann Duffy (UK), Salena Godden (UK), Joy Harjo (USA), Kei Miller (Jamaica / UK), Grace Nichols (Guyana / UK), Roger Robinson (Trinidad / UK), Tanya Shirley (Jamaica), and Dorothea Smartt (Barbados / UK). Translator of academic essays (literary studies, visual culture, history, political studies), theatre plays, and films.
Katja Zakrajšek holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Ljubljana. She is a literary translator working from English, French and Portuguese into Slovenian. Believing in decolonising and diversifying literary canons, she prefers to focus on literary traditions and spaces underrepresented in translation, in particular African and Afro-Diasporic writing. She is the recipient of several translation awards, including the Sovre award for best literary translation into Slovenian for Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other in 2022.
Ester Gendusa holds an MA from Birkbeck College and a PhD from the University of Palermo (Italy), where she is currently a research fellow in English language and translation. The author of Asimmetrie di genere e di razza in The Grass is Singing di Doris Lessing (2011) and of the first Italian monograph on Bernardine Evaristo’s literary production, Identità nere e cultura europea (2014), she has published extensively on post-colonial and (Black) British authors. Her most recent research interests reside in the interplay between language and power in contemporary multimodal discursive arenas (including news media) and in the representation of antinormative identities in British and American films.
