5 and 6 March 2026
Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, University of Reading
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 will be in hybrid format for the papers, and we will be able to support 20 in-person places for the workshop and collections sessions.
For now, please hold the date. We will be posting more information soon about how you can book your place.
Speakers:
Borna Izadpanah, University of Reading
Script, stone, and type: visual continuities in Iran’s earliest printed Qurʼans
Erin Piñon, Kunsthistorisches Institut
‘In the lithographic studio of Hovhannes Muyhendisyan’: Ottoman-Armenian encounters with the lithographic press
Hannah Rose Blakeley, Princeton University
Belgian lithography and book illustration ca. 1900
Helena de Barros, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro
Material logics of printed colour in European and Brazilian chromolithography
Wei Jin Darryl Lim
Lithography at Riau’s ‘Gateway to Mecca’: print and scribal labour in Penyengat island, 1856–79
Asiel Sepúlveda, Babson College
Picturing “the fog effect:” Lithography and the spectacle of sugar manufacturing in nineteenth-century Cuba
Mimi Cheng, Kunsthistorisches Institut
Medium and message in nineteenth-century maps of East Asia
Abstracts and speaker bios will follow shortly.