Fellows

Buxi Duan completed his doctoral research on D. H. Lawrence’s late journalistic writing at the University of Birmingham. His academic interests primarily lie in modernist publishing culture, archival studies, and textual criticism. Through his teaching and research experience, Buxi developed a passion for exploring archival materials, uncovering the hidden contributions of figures traditionally marginalised in mainstream narratives, and piecing together untold stories to give them the overdue recognition they deserve. One of Buxi’s ongoing projects focuses on Nancy Pearn, the literary agent of D. H. Lawrence, and her contributions to Lawrence’s reputation in the journalistic marketplace. During his visiting research…Read More >

Pritha Mukherjee is an interdisciplinary researcher at the University of Reading. Her doctoral research focusses on pirated books networks in the contemporary Indian book market. Her current research project examines how interactions between Indian and international publishers at Frankfurt and London book fairs contributed to the development of trade book fairs in India and shaped the contours of the multilingual Indian publishing industry. During her fellowship at the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing, she will be documenting how India and its book market were represented at the Frankfurt and London Book Fairs (between 1970 and 1999) and map the…Read More >

Dr Jennifer Taylor holds a PhD in Art and Intellectual History from The Warburg Institute, School of Advanced Study, University of London. An exhibited fine artist, she earned her MFA at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, with her work featured in exhibitions at the Boston Cyclorama and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Her academic interests encompass feminist studies, visual culture, children’s literature, and intellectual history. By blending academic research with material exploration, she emphasises the importance of understanding creative works through the perspective of their makers. This approach includes examining how creative…Read More >

Helena de Barros is an Assistant Professor at Rio de Janeiro State University. She holds a PhD in design and is a researcher and collector of historical and contemporary prints. Her work delves into the impact of image reproduction technologies on design expressive capabilities, focusing on Brazilian graphic memory. Her research project at the University of Reading centres on chromolithography, a historical colour printing technique. Through this study, she aims to enhance identification skills in historical prints and material culture research methods. The Michael Twyman collection of chromolithographic prints offers a wide variety of samples and the opportunity to deepen…Read More >

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. During her stay at the Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing, she will study correspondences between the Publishers Association and several British publishers in the 1930s and 40s…Read More >

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. During his doctoral research, Xunchang encountered the Chinese metal types recently acquired by the University of Reading (UoR) collections and conducted an initial analysis. His proposed study at the Centre Book Cultures and Publishing (CBCP) involves a comprehensive comparison of identified printed materials and UoR collections of Chinese metal types to trace their origins and evaluate their significance. Beyond material analysis, he intends to…Read More >

Dr Billy Kahora is a writer from Kenya and a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Bristol. He has written a non-fiction novella titled The True Story Of David Munyakei (2010) and a short story collection, The Cape Cod Bicycle War (2019). His short fiction and creative non-fiction has appeared in Chimurenga, McSweeney’s, Granta Online, Internazionale and Vanity Fair and Kwani. He has just completed a novel titled Babilon Falling. He recently co-edited an issue of Wasafiri around Human Rights Cultures. His academic research is on the Kenyan political novel; creative writing pedagogies in sub-Saharan Africa; African Literature realisms; and creative non-fiction….Read More >

Laurence Talairach is a Professor of Victorian Literature at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès and an associate researcher at the Alexandre-Koyré Center for the History of Science and Technology (Paris). Her academic interests span medicine, natural history and British literature in the long nineteenth century. Her most recent monograph is Animals, Museum Culture and Children’s Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Curious Beasties (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). Her current research aims to map out the forms of natural historical knowledge produced by British women in the nineteenth century and seeks to examine the complexity of the relationship between scientific knowledge and popular representations,…Read More >

Dr Abba Abba’s research engagement has been devoted to the study of Biafran identity and secessionist discourse. In his proposed research at University of Reading he is working with Dr Sue Walsh to address the controversies that have become ingrained in the archival study of the Nigeria-Biafra war literature. The troubling stories that emerge from the interstices of the Nigeria-Biafra dichotomy indicate that the voices that come through in Biafra’s secessionist discourse speak of excesses and absences in a way that calls attention to an unfinished business of mourning and healing. The result is that the excluded voices keep returning…Read More >

Dr. Castellano is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages and Literature Teaching at the University of València. She holds a Ph.D. in Language, Literature and Culture (UV) and has been awarded with research fellow scholarships at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Queen Mary University of London and Universidade de Aveiro (Portugal). Author of the essay awarded book Les altres catalanes. Memòria, identitat i autobiografia en la literatura d’immigració (2018), she has also published several journal articles related to postcolonial literature, identity construction and multimodal approaches in L2 teaching. A former high school teacher and former director of…Read More >