CBCP x OIW webinar series ‘Explorations in Translation for Children’ El Cuento Fantasma/ The Invisible Story
2024-10-16 17:00 - 18:30 (Europe/London)
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.

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

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

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

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

PROGRAMME
Thursday, 5 March

9.30—10.00
Coffee & registration

10.00—10.15
Welcome & opening remarks

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

11.30—12.00
Coffee break (provided)

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

13.00—14.15
Lunch (provided)

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

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

Friday, 6 March

9.30—10.15
Coffee (provided)

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

12.30—13.30
Lunch (provided)

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

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

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

19.15
Conference Dinner (participants & invited guests)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CBCP x OIW webinar: Arabic Young Adult Literature in Translation, 23 April
2026-04-23 17:00 - 18:30
The webinar series ‘Explorations in Translation for Children’ is co-organised by The Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing in partnership with Outside in World, the organisation dedicated to exploring and promoting children’s books in translation.
23rd April 2026, 5pm-6.30pm UK time. Online only. To join via MS Teams, please register here.
Arabic Young Adult Literature in Translation: in conversation with translators, advocates and scholars of Arabic-language writing for young audiences, Sawad Hussain, Susanne Abou Ghaida and Marcia Lynx Qualey. Despite a huge, diverse base of speakers and vibrant publishing industries, relatively little Arabic-language literature is available in translation to readers of English. This is particularly true of books for children and young adults.
Drawing on many collective years of experience in the field, our speakers will talk about what kind of Arabic-language YA is getting translated into English, who is translating and publishing these works, and what might be behind some of these trends. They will offer us a window into the scouting and pitching processes, discussing the specific challenges and opportunities that they face in translating children’s books from Arabic to English. We will learn about advocacy initiatives such as ArabKidLitNow! and the Bila Hudood digital literary festival, hear about what titles they have translated recently, and what they are hoping to translate next.
Speakers:
Sawad Hussain is a PEN Award-winning translator from Arabic. She has been shortlisted for The Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize and the National Book Award for Translation, and longlisted for the Moore Prize in Human Rights Writing, among others. A former co-chair of the Translators’ Association in the UK, Sawad has also served as a judge for the Palestine Book Awards and the 2023 National Translation Award. She has run translation workshops under the auspices of Shadow Heroes, Africa Writes, Shubbak Festival, the Yiddish Book Center, the British Library and the National Centre for Writing. In 2024, she became the first translator-in-residence for Wasafiri, and was the Spring 2025 translator-in-residence at PIIRS, Princeton University.
Marcia Lynx Qualey is a writer, publisher, editor, translator, and speaker. She is the founder of ArabLit & ArabLit Quarterly, for which she won an Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature in 2024. Her personal focus is on translated literature for young readers, including YA, middle grade, and chapter books. Her most recent is a co-translation — with Sawad Hussain — of Maria Daadouch’s I Want Golden Eyes.
Susanne Abou Ghaida is a researcher specialised in Arabic children’s and adolescent literature. She has a PhD from the University of Glasgow, and her doctoral research was on the contemporary Arabic adolescent novel. From 2023 to 2025, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Aix-Marseille University, where she was carrying out research on The 13 Devils, an Arab espionage/adventure series for adolescents. She has written on a number of subjects, including multicultural picture books; disability; Arabic adolescent literature and reading response. She is currently the Vice President of the Young Adult Studies Association and Senior Editor of the International Journal of Young Adult Literature.
A compilation of the books and resources discussed in the webinar, along with titles for children/ YAs translated into English from Arabic between 2000-2026 can be found here: Arabic YA Webinar_Booklist and resources

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

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

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

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

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

4th CBCP Postgraduate Symposium, 19 May 2026
2026-05-19 09:00 - 17:15 | Global Study Lounge, 2nd floor, Edith Morley Building, University of Reading (Whiteknights campus), RG6 6EL, RG6 6EL
The Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing (CBCP) is pleased to announce the 4th Postgraduate Symposium will take place on Tuesday, 19th May 2026. This will be a hybrid event and is an opportunity for PhD students and Postdoctoral researchers to present their research, engage in discussions on book cultures and publishing, and connect with a broader academic community within the University of Reading and beyond.
This year’s hybrid symposium will explore how archives can be used to reconstruct agency and cultural transmission in book and print cultures. It will be free to attend and refreshments will be provided.
Venue: Global Study Lounge, Edith Morley Building, University of Reading (Whiteknights Campus)

To attend any of the Stream 1 talks online via MS Teams, please register here.
To attend any of the Stream 2 talks online via MS Teams, please register here.
Registering to attend the symposium in-person has now closed.

9.00 – 9:20 Arrival and refreshments

9.20 – 9.25 Welcome and Introduction

9.25 – 10.55
Stream 1: Archiving children’s reading cultures and publishing ecosystems (chair: Sophie Heywood)

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

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

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

11.00 – 11.15 Coffee break

11.15 – 12. 45
Stream 1: Archives and books in political discourse (chair: Cristina De Luca)

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

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

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

12.45 – 1.30 Lunch

1.30 – 2.30 Workshop with MERL

2.30 – 2.45 Coffee break

2.45 – 4.00
Stream 1: Typography developments through the archives (chair: Abeera Zishan)

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

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

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

4.00 – 5.00
Stream 1: Alternative forms of archive (chair: Nicola Wilson)

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

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

Angelika Wozniak – The communicative role of textbooks and guides on book design published in Poland between 1945 and 2000 in the context of socio-political changes (in person)
Ksenia Papazova – The Materiality of the Page as a Photographic Filter in Neovintage Books (in person)

5.00 – 5.15 Closing remarks

CBCP Symposium: People in Publishing: Diversity, Leadership and Publishing’s Futures, 29 June 2026
2026-06-29 10:00 - 17:00 | Henley Business School, University of Reading (Whiteknights campus), RG6 6UD
Date: Monday 29th June 2026
Time: 10.00am – 5.00pm
Venue: Henley Business School, University of Reading (Whiteknights Campus)
Registration to attend the symposium has now closed.
A booklet for the symposium containing the programme schedule & short biographies of the chairs and speakers is available here.
(Please note: For standard delegates, we will charge £10 to cover a sandwich lunch, and morning & afternoon refreshments. Students & independent researchers can attend free of charge. Online attendance is also free of charge)
Schedule
10:00 – 10:05: Welcome & introductions (HBS G10)
Marrisa Joseph – Associate Professor of Organisation Studies and Business History, Henley Business School, University of Reading

10:05 – 10:35: Opening Address: “Building Diversity in the Media Industries” (HBS G10)
Joanna Abeyie MBE – Former Director of Creative Diversity BBC, Founder BlueMoon Consultancy  (in person)

10:35 – 11:30: Panel: “Bridging the Gap: Academia and Industry in Dialogue on EDI in the Publishing Industry” (HBS G10)

Moderator: Fiona McLachlan, Business Relationship Manager, Knowledge Exchange & External Partnerships, University of Reading
Panel:

Melissa Carr – Lecturer in International Human Resources Management & EDI Director at World of Work Institute, University of Reading (in person)
Vaseem Khan – Crime Fiction author (in person)
Emma Shercliff – Laxfield Literary Associates (in person)

11:30 –11:45: Comfort break (HBS Foyer)

11:45 – 1:00: Research Papers: “Geo-politics and Global Structures” (HBS G10)
Chair:  Jack Harrington – CEO, British Academy of Management
Panel:

Hyei Jin Kim (University of Reading) – “Who Governs the Flow of Books?: The Legacy of the Traditional Market Agreement” (in person)
Karishma Koshal (University of Exeter) – “The Foundations of the Anglophone Trade Publishing Industry in India” (in person)
Frances Weightman (Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing) – “Becoming a Reluctant Gatekeeper: A Case Study of the Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing” (online)
Maria Belen Riveiro (University of Buenos Aires/University of Newcastle) – “Rethinking Bibliodiversity: the Universal Put into Question” (in person)

1:00 – 1:45: Networking lunch (HBS Foyer)

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

Stream 1: “Commercial Approaches to Diversifying Publishing”
Chair: Sophie Heywood (University of Reading)
(HBS G10)

Stream 2: “Networks & Institutional Power”
Chair: Cristina De Luca (University of Reading)
(HBS G04)

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

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

Agata Mrva-Montoya (University of Sydney) – “Accessibility Champions as Diversity Leaders: Driving Publishing’s Inclusive Future” (in person)
Chrissy Taylor (University of Waikato) – “Gender and Sexual Identity in Aotearoa New Zealand: Library Acquisition Policies in Relation to LGBTQIA+ Communities in New Zealand” (online)

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

3:15 – 3:30: Coffee/tea break (HBS Foyer)

3:30 – 4:30: Roundtable: “Digital Platforms and AI in the Future of Publishing” (HBS G10)

Moderator:  Dominic Lees, Associate Professor in Filmmaking, Convenor of the Synthetic Media Research Network University of Reading,
Discussants:

Basak Bak – Lecturer in Law, Copyright and AI, University of Reading (in person)
Simon Rowberry – Associate Professor of Publishing, UCL (in person)
Julie Cohen – Author, PhD Candidate, University of Reading (in person)

4:30 – 5:00: Keynote: “Inclusive Talent Pipelines” (HBS G10)
Katy Shaw – Director of the UKRI/AHRC Creative Communities Programme; Professor of Publishing & Writing, Northumbria University (online)
Introduced by Nicola Wilson, Professor of Book and Publishing Studies, University of Reading

5:00: Wrap up followed by an informal CBCP social/drinks (HBS G10)

The Languages of Children's Books: Celebrating the National Year of Reading at the University of Reading
2026-09-17 09:00 - 17:00 | University of Reading, London Road Campus
Co-organised by the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing and Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism at the University of Reading, in partnership with Outside in World and World Kid Lit month.
This mini festival will be held in person on the London Road campus of the University of Reading, with some sessions offered for online participants.
The Languages of Children’s Books: Celebrating Translation and Linguistic Diversity
Languages are a central part of bringing diverse books to readers, and ensuring those stories speak to them. This one-day festival celebrates the work taking place across different sectors of the of the children’s book world (academics, advocacy organisations, creators, educators, librarians, publishers, translators) to promote children’s access to stories in translation, multilingual storytelling and linguistic diversity in their books. As part of the National Year of Reading in the UK, we believe it is important to showcase the many ways in which the languages of their books can inspire young people to get reading.
The mini festival will be structured around panel discussions, interactive workshops, showcases, and exhibitions. Confirmed speakers and exhibitors include:

Jake Hope, The Carnegies
Dr Megan Farr, Books Council of Wales
Dr Darren Chetty and Professor Karen Sands O’Connor, authors of Beyond the Secret Garden: Children’s Literature and Representations of Black and Racially minoritised People
Dr Anish Harrison, National Literacy Trust
Professor Sabine Little, University of Sheffield
Dr Sophie Liggins, University of Essex
Dr Charlotte Ryland, Stephen Spender Trust/ University of Oxford
Sarah Ardizzone, Translator
Anam Zafar, Translator/ World Kid Lit
Pushkin Press Children’s Books
Thames & Hudson
Otter-Barry Books
Mantra Lingua
Milet Publishing
The Emma Press
International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) UK

Full programme and registration details to follow soon. For more information contact Sophie Heywood s.l.heywood@reading.ac.uk.
This event has been generously funded by the AHRC Impact Accelerator fund, the Centre for Book Cultures & Publishing and the Centre for Literacy & Multilingualism.
